What a great piece! As a contrast to the lifestyle portrayed in “Perfection” I’ll offer Gary Snyder’s eco-Buddhist approach. Snyder and Wendell Berry, who’s mentioned in other people’s comments, enjoyed a long friendship and correspondence, seen in their book “Distant Neighbors.” Berry’s farm was in Kentucky; Snyder has claimed the Sierra Nevadas as his place. To paraphrase Snyder, he advises us to find a place, learn it and understand it, take care of it. He’s talking about the landscape, its health, and by extension, our own. There’s an irony in a lifestyle that has people living without attachment to any given place since it does not square with the politics of caring for the environment. Your post here addresses the personal cost involved in chasing every opportunity and the antidotes to that. Great piece. It’s the next iteration on this whole line of thinking.
Excellent read. I woke up this morning (many mornings lately) thinking about how I feel so ... unremarkable. And how that feels almost like a sin, like a terrible failure in this current state of millennial social-media-driven 'culture' and society. Like you, I was seasonally nomadic (tho I worked in service jobs instead of digital jobs), living and traveling in France, Hawaii, Spain, and summering at home in New England, and then, in the midst of my big plans for living abroad, I met my husband and got pregnant unexpectedly. Life switched up on me real quick. We 'settled down' and that was not what I was expecting for myself. Sometimes it feels like the most magical, meaningful way to be, but sometimes I wonder if I'm missing something, and worse, I often feel like a loser in the eyes of people who used to be my peers and community, as they travel and document their lives abroad and do all the things that I no longer have time or resources for in these early years of motherhood. This essay really helped me dig into some of what I've been contemplating and struggling with. Thank you.
Nice article - and if I can add to the necessary friction of having a toddler around, what about the old-age thing? When you suddenly need to be somewhere where you are known, have a doctor, can stand the politics, (just) but above all have friends? Sometimes you have an attachment to place because you need it to be attached to you!
Thank you Rosie, I loved this piece. As an elder GenX-er (I'm 61), I sort of missed this whole 'nomadic' digital lifestyle thing in the early stages of my career (there was no internet till I was almost 30), but I know I would have gravitated towards it had it been available... I was so restless due to so many factors (unstable childhood, the breakdown of the social contract that really started to show up in the money-money-money 80s, and so much more).
My identity was so malleable in my 20s (I think that's probably the point of our 20s!) and I was always looking for something to 'fix' it to - a relationship, a role, a 'look', a place. I fell in with a pretty fast crowd in London and got swept along by the glamour of it all, not seeing the darkness within it that derailed, damaged and consumed so many of my 'tribe', including my then-husband. We were a big gang of lost children in grown-up clothes, playing with matches.
After the devastation of divorce and infertility led to permanent childlessness, along with losing my income, savings, home, business and peer group, combined with peri-menopause and the grief of childlessness, I passed through a brutal dark night of the soul in the first half of my forties that burned it all away. But what remained was a longing for roots. To know and feel known by a place, even if I couldn't find that safely with humans.
Fast forward to my early 50s, and on the other side of my training to become a psychotherapist, and as a published non-fiction author, I met a safe and reliable partner who hated cities and only ever lived rurally. I am half Irish, he lived in Ireland, and here we are. Living on a piece of land by the Atlantic where we've built our own house, and this summer we're learning (the hard way!) how to grow vegetables.
I've studied Ancestral Lineage healing with Daniel Foor, and have trained to lead the Work That Reconnects framework created by Joanna Macy. I've now been in Ireland for 7 years, and in this house for 2 years. I've nursed my mother-in-law, who lived with us until she died, and sat with my own mother as she died from dementia. I've made meaningful friends and many, many local connections. And now I'm co-creating the first ALTERKIN Circle (Alternative Kinship Circle) for those in my local area who are ageing without children. (A dream I've been nurturing for a long time...)
Each season that rolls by, I see the same trees blossoming and the changes in the land. And it sees me. I am rooted in place, and rather than this leading to contraction, I sense a marvellous expansion. I have an energy-sapping complaint (maybe long covid, no one knows) and so I don't even go into my local market town as much as I did right now. Yet my life hasn't shrunk; it's concentrated.
I don't want to glamourise community or rural life. Because, you know, humans are gonna human! But this messy complexity of beings, plants and energies that encircles me, supports me, challenges me? This is the home my soul knew, long before I did.
As someone who grew up moving around between three continents & 5 countries, this piece, ‘Perfection’, and a lot of the comments strongly resonated with me.
Growing up as a nomad/TCK with my parents moving our family to a new country every 3-4years, the chasing “the perfect place” with the least amount of perfection and a true sense of belonging. It’s a restless chase of a place that doesn’t exist. Or if it exists it’s very temporary and fleeting.
I’m German and been living in the UK for 15years now. When I get itchy feet & wanderlust-y, I’ve realised a long weekend somewhere lovely in mainland Europe will do too. And reading this article and the comments has given me A LOT to think about.
One perspective I do want to add and emphasise as well tough is that of ‘neo-colonialism’ or ‘neo-imperialism’ and the problematic nature of privileges and ‘wealthy’ North Americans and Europeans moving to gorgeous places in the Global South an absolutely messing up the community ecosystems. Extortionate rises in rent prices, groceries, gentrifying whole cities and islands with AirBnb and coffee show take overs without giving anything back to the community but their digital nomadically-earned dollars and Euros. It’s highly problematic! Berlin, Bali, Mexico City just to name a few.. Luckily locals are stating to challenge it like in Barcelona and Madrid.
Those of us with the privilege to pursue the journey to the most frictionless life, please lets bring ethical (not just environmentally friendly) but also socio-economic and neo-colonial awareness into out desicion making processes. Because otherwise we just keep feeding into a problem… 🙏🏻❤️
Good point about the neo-colonialsim. I wrote about that back in my days of covering this topic, and I think that critique is kind of embedded into the ideas of this essay. But I definitely could have made it more explicit.
Wonderful piece! And thank you for prioritizing truly excellent work at a more intermittent pace than the churn of regular posting. Your writing and thinking is top notch.
One thing I've been thinking about in this vein is the amount of time it takes to settle into a place as a layer of all of this. My family moved to semi-rural Maine in the pandemic and for three years I dreamed of moving back to cities because I missed infrastructure, diversity, walkability, cultural events, food, etc. - all the things that we millennials love to optimize. Then about a year ago a switch flipped, probably significantly due to my older child starting public school and developing more of a community with other parents vs. the non-community of the childcare center pick up and drop off; or just realizing it takes a few years to feel like you've made good friends. I realized I used to yearn for all the millennial lifestyle things constantly to the point of nearly uprooting our lives, and now I can't imagine living anywhere else. I have my people, my librarians, the barista at the single coffee shop, and on and on. There is a ton of friction and things aren't particularly run very well, nor is there much investment locally, but there is meaning. This is ours, no one is coming to save us. There is that sense of ownership and love for something (a community) that is a bit rough around the edges.
I wonder if there is the element of time to settle into a place, and also perhaps layered on with age (I'm starting to push my late 30s and I can also tell my expectations around so many things are shifting). Curious to hear if others have thought about this.
Thank you for sharing! I didn't mention aging in this piece, but I probably should have, as I think that's a factor too. You just have less energy to be striving all the time! However, I will say that doesn't seem to apply to everyone. Some people age, but don't get better at accepting stuff.
I have! I could have written this comment if I could express myself so beautifully. Just replace semi-rural Maine with Abruzzo, a semi-rural Italian region where I was born and returned after 15 years abroad and over 20 away…
I believe four years is the magic number, sounds like that's about when you started feeling settled :) I'm currently back in Seattle, where I grew up, after spending many years on the East Coast and abroad in college and beyond. I never intended to move back here (COVID brought us back) or stay (but it has been nice having family around with young kids) and I still want to move back East or abroad, BUT we have been back ~4 years now and I do have that feeling now of being pretty settled.
I always wanted to travel when I was younger. But buying a house when I was 30 put the end to that dream. I find as I have aged that there are comforts I like, a good chair to read and knit, a nice cotton blanket, food, peace and quiet. I did eventually move from the east coast to Texas for financial reasons, and I hated the actual state that I lived in, too much of a caste system even there. Steel workers verses bankers.
When I moved I knew that I would need to adapt, compromise, forget how I lived “back east” because living in Texas is unique. One of the things you must do wherever you go is the ability to compromise. Now going to a local grocery store is a one hour drive one way, our library is in the midst of a lawsuit and hasn’t bought books or any materials in six years. There are two factions fighting and both have lost more than they will ever gain. We trade books, and dvds. We have for profit hospitals, and I am not sure I get quality care. We are on our own, we know that there is no government agency that can deal with cattle ranchers, a small city community, and people who can’t support a good grocery store. Each has unique issues. You deal with it. You also chip in for school supplies even if you don’t have kids. You drop off extra produce, eggs, cucumbers, donated to the fish fry, bbq to support the firehouse, do a stint at the food stand at the football game. You check on the elderly, this is your new life.
When I wake up at night, I can see billions of stars outside my window.
This was a wonderful read, thank you so much. I always feel that social media orients us in a world that doesn’t physically exist and is bigger than we can comprehend. It’s unsettling and anxiety inducing. Whenever that existential off-ness kicks in, I find all I need to do is re-orient myself to my immediate surroundings and that tethering helps me feel “real” again. I think what you’ve written about reminds me of this experience on a grand, life, and global scale. Maybe re-orienting oneself in a single, geographic coordinate can help a person feel real and significant again.
I'd recommend finding some of Stephen Jenkinson's work on belonging to a place, it would resonate with what you mention at the end! To be of service to a place can create a sense of connection and belonging - could this be how we find meaning? Tending a garden, a neighbor, our path to school, etc.
This is filled with such wonderful insight about the opportunity costs of mobility and optionality. When I was younger, I wanted to model Wendell Berry’s deep attachment to place. Then that place really decayed with regard to job opportunity and safety, and it made sense to leave. Which was painful, but I did. And the move turned out to be a very solid decision. One of the biggest challenges of the current regime/current events is that it’s putting into play not only changing cities (which is hard enough) but also countries. The stakes are so much higher!
Wendell Berry speaks and writes with such persistent integrity and authenticity. I was able to hear him in person reading his own work once - I’m so glad I did.
As I was in the midst of this whole go/stay set of decisions myself, I came across his poem “What We Need Is Here.”
And boy was it ever addressing the heart of the matter!
Berry has had the option for a good way forward over a lifetime in Henry County, Kentucky.
But what about those of us who aren’t so fortunate in a choice of place? When is the opportunity cost of staying too high?
What an excellent piece. We've ended up doing some version of this backwards and wrong as, in our early 40s, we bought a sailboat and now travel as nomads with our two kids in tow. The lifestyle has more than enough friction, but also odd moments of the sort of travel lifestyle fantasy you see on the internet. While it is never easy, this piece made me doubly grateful that we live as nomads the way we do - with the messiness of family and moving a floating piece of fiberglass around with us while calling it home. I'll be sitting with one for a while as I think through various reactions to it. Really appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
Thank you for this essay, I resonate so much with it! Even though I have never lived a digital nomad-esque life (albeit also having lived in different countries including Lisbon, which has to be one of my favourite places in the world- with all its shortcomings) much of what I have been thinking about lately goes along the lines of how we get less and less good at dealing with friction, facing adversity. I think so much energy goes into avoiding discomfort instead of sitting with it- and we all kind of know that that doesn’t really work in the long run. As life gets more and more convenient, I wonder if it also just gets less .. meaningful? And not actually as much easier?
Yup. I was the first person in my field with a Palm Pilot, adopted spreadsheets for managing my municipal budgets, e-mail for communications, all in the last century. And then, 3-4 years ago, pitched my upgraded 'smartphone' figuratively into the wood chipper (along with the Alexa thing that seemed so clever), retired into a 100-year-old-bungalow in a declining industrial river city in NW Illinois. I get around on my old Raleigh bicycle for 90% of my, ehm, getting around. I'm settling here. I'm improving my wood shed and garden this summer.
I, too, thought here of Wendell Berry. It's been 3-4 years ago somebody stuck a copy of "Hannah Coulter: A novel of the Port William Membership" in my hands, and for over a month or so we read it aloud at bed time, often finishing with my big blue handkerchief under my glasses and at my nose, as the stories jogged so clearly what's been lost in the time I've been of age. This passage stuck with me, and is relevant here, in which Hannah, twice widowed, sees changing about her town, her community, her relationships;, changing almost inexorably. It rhymes well with Iris Dement's "My Town", too:
"The old neighborliness has about gone from it now. The old harvest crews and their talk and their laughter at kitchen tables loaded with food have been replaced by machines, and by migrant laborers who eat at the store. The old thrift that once kept us alive has been replaced by extravagance and waste. People are living as if they think they are in a movie. They are all looking in one direction, toward a 'better place', and what they see is no thicker than a screen." (pge 179)
Your writing is 'collapse aware', and more. The World, and The Machine which would own it, consume it and turn it all into commodity and money, is spinning faster and faster, and I don't think the connecting rods and pistons can take much more. I have wood to split and stack. Winter's coming. Thanks for what you bring to us. Hold fast.
This made me think of a friction “tradeoff”. That sometimes one needs to accept “worthwhile” friction (eg the physical and mental toll of moving to and settling in a new place, and in my case learning a new language and culture) to reduce “unwanted” friction (eg difficulty in accessing community/support) and enable the emergence of whatever it is we value most and choose to prioritise. Living in Seoul is not perfection. After almost a year here I still experience a lot of cultural friction and probably always will to some extent. But it’s a good learning experience and in any case, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I like my friction tradeoff :)
Thanks Rosie for articulating some of my own complicated thoughts about the same things that you discuss here!
This quest for perfection or something like it was partly what led me to leave the UK (I left for a job and for a relationship, both not great reasons in the end 😆), but it fed into something in my mind that I would feel like I 'belonged' somewhere eventually. But I was always chasing something else. I have now bounced between a few countries and jobs but have lived in Asia for 11 years. Where I live is not perfect by any means from a number of different angles, but sometimes you just have to commit to stuff - a place and the people. In some ways, you have make peace with the choices that you make and yes, choose to ignore (or again, make peace with) certain things.
I know that this is easier said than done when it comes to other structural stuff like politics; culture; language and so on (certainly, having certain passports help too because you know that you can leave).
Great piece❣️As a third culture kid/adult, I thrive in chaos and friction, finding it keeps me high on adrenaline. Even having babies didn't cure that jitter; I was always moving around with them. Until my youngest turned seven, she'd had enough. She said, "Mummy, we don't want to move anymore, it's tiring." Her words resonated deeply, forcing me to finally stay in one place. Now that my children are turning into young adults, I crave starting over again somewhere new, perhaps reconnecting with my roots in Asia, even though Europe also feels like home. I'm currently living in the Netherlands. I know better than to believe Utopia exists, and going back to Ithaca seems absurd when you don't have Penelope or Telemachus waiting for you. Yet the feeling of restlessness is still there, and I keep reminding myself that wherever I go, I take myself with me, imperfections and all. Finding true contentment is easier said than done for someone like me.
What a great piece! As a contrast to the lifestyle portrayed in “Perfection” I’ll offer Gary Snyder’s eco-Buddhist approach. Snyder and Wendell Berry, who’s mentioned in other people’s comments, enjoyed a long friendship and correspondence, seen in their book “Distant Neighbors.” Berry’s farm was in Kentucky; Snyder has claimed the Sierra Nevadas as his place. To paraphrase Snyder, he advises us to find a place, learn it and understand it, take care of it. He’s talking about the landscape, its health, and by extension, our own. There’s an irony in a lifestyle that has people living without attachment to any given place since it does not square with the politics of caring for the environment. Your post here addresses the personal cost involved in chasing every opportunity and the antidotes to that. Great piece. It’s the next iteration on this whole line of thinking.
Excellent read. I woke up this morning (many mornings lately) thinking about how I feel so ... unremarkable. And how that feels almost like a sin, like a terrible failure in this current state of millennial social-media-driven 'culture' and society. Like you, I was seasonally nomadic (tho I worked in service jobs instead of digital jobs), living and traveling in France, Hawaii, Spain, and summering at home in New England, and then, in the midst of my big plans for living abroad, I met my husband and got pregnant unexpectedly. Life switched up on me real quick. We 'settled down' and that was not what I was expecting for myself. Sometimes it feels like the most magical, meaningful way to be, but sometimes I wonder if I'm missing something, and worse, I often feel like a loser in the eyes of people who used to be my peers and community, as they travel and document their lives abroad and do all the things that I no longer have time or resources for in these early years of motherhood. This essay really helped me dig into some of what I've been contemplating and struggling with. Thank you.
Beautiful comment! Thank you for sharing
Nice article - and if I can add to the necessary friction of having a toddler around, what about the old-age thing? When you suddenly need to be somewhere where you are known, have a doctor, can stand the politics, (just) but above all have friends? Sometimes you have an attachment to place because you need it to be attached to you!
Such a good point! We assume we can live our lives with the luxury of remaining "unattached" -- but it doesn't age well.
Thank you Rosie, I loved this piece. As an elder GenX-er (I'm 61), I sort of missed this whole 'nomadic' digital lifestyle thing in the early stages of my career (there was no internet till I was almost 30), but I know I would have gravitated towards it had it been available... I was so restless due to so many factors (unstable childhood, the breakdown of the social contract that really started to show up in the money-money-money 80s, and so much more).
My identity was so malleable in my 20s (I think that's probably the point of our 20s!) and I was always looking for something to 'fix' it to - a relationship, a role, a 'look', a place. I fell in with a pretty fast crowd in London and got swept along by the glamour of it all, not seeing the darkness within it that derailed, damaged and consumed so many of my 'tribe', including my then-husband. We were a big gang of lost children in grown-up clothes, playing with matches.
After the devastation of divorce and infertility led to permanent childlessness, along with losing my income, savings, home, business and peer group, combined with peri-menopause and the grief of childlessness, I passed through a brutal dark night of the soul in the first half of my forties that burned it all away. But what remained was a longing for roots. To know and feel known by a place, even if I couldn't find that safely with humans.
Fast forward to my early 50s, and on the other side of my training to become a psychotherapist, and as a published non-fiction author, I met a safe and reliable partner who hated cities and only ever lived rurally. I am half Irish, he lived in Ireland, and here we are. Living on a piece of land by the Atlantic where we've built our own house, and this summer we're learning (the hard way!) how to grow vegetables.
I've studied Ancestral Lineage healing with Daniel Foor, and have trained to lead the Work That Reconnects framework created by Joanna Macy. I've now been in Ireland for 7 years, and in this house for 2 years. I've nursed my mother-in-law, who lived with us until she died, and sat with my own mother as she died from dementia. I've made meaningful friends and many, many local connections. And now I'm co-creating the first ALTERKIN Circle (Alternative Kinship Circle) for those in my local area who are ageing without children. (A dream I've been nurturing for a long time...)
Each season that rolls by, I see the same trees blossoming and the changes in the land. And it sees me. I am rooted in place, and rather than this leading to contraction, I sense a marvellous expansion. I have an energy-sapping complaint (maybe long covid, no one knows) and so I don't even go into my local market town as much as I did right now. Yet my life hasn't shrunk; it's concentrated.
I don't want to glamourise community or rural life. Because, you know, humans are gonna human! But this messy complexity of beings, plants and energies that encircles me, supports me, challenges me? This is the home my soul knew, long before I did.
As someone who grew up moving around between three continents & 5 countries, this piece, ‘Perfection’, and a lot of the comments strongly resonated with me.
Growing up as a nomad/TCK with my parents moving our family to a new country every 3-4years, the chasing “the perfect place” with the least amount of perfection and a true sense of belonging. It’s a restless chase of a place that doesn’t exist. Or if it exists it’s very temporary and fleeting.
I’m German and been living in the UK for 15years now. When I get itchy feet & wanderlust-y, I’ve realised a long weekend somewhere lovely in mainland Europe will do too. And reading this article and the comments has given me A LOT to think about.
One perspective I do want to add and emphasise as well tough is that of ‘neo-colonialism’ or ‘neo-imperialism’ and the problematic nature of privileges and ‘wealthy’ North Americans and Europeans moving to gorgeous places in the Global South an absolutely messing up the community ecosystems. Extortionate rises in rent prices, groceries, gentrifying whole cities and islands with AirBnb and coffee show take overs without giving anything back to the community but their digital nomadically-earned dollars and Euros. It’s highly problematic! Berlin, Bali, Mexico City just to name a few.. Luckily locals are stating to challenge it like in Barcelona and Madrid.
Those of us with the privilege to pursue the journey to the most frictionless life, please lets bring ethical (not just environmentally friendly) but also socio-economic and neo-colonial awareness into out desicion making processes. Because otherwise we just keep feeding into a problem… 🙏🏻❤️
Good point about the neo-colonialsim. I wrote about that back in my days of covering this topic, and I think that critique is kind of embedded into the ideas of this essay. But I definitely could have made it more explicit.
Not at all a criticism but more of an addition 😊
Oh don’t worry I didn’t take it as a critique!
Wonderful piece! And thank you for prioritizing truly excellent work at a more intermittent pace than the churn of regular posting. Your writing and thinking is top notch.
One thing I've been thinking about in this vein is the amount of time it takes to settle into a place as a layer of all of this. My family moved to semi-rural Maine in the pandemic and for three years I dreamed of moving back to cities because I missed infrastructure, diversity, walkability, cultural events, food, etc. - all the things that we millennials love to optimize. Then about a year ago a switch flipped, probably significantly due to my older child starting public school and developing more of a community with other parents vs. the non-community of the childcare center pick up and drop off; or just realizing it takes a few years to feel like you've made good friends. I realized I used to yearn for all the millennial lifestyle things constantly to the point of nearly uprooting our lives, and now I can't imagine living anywhere else. I have my people, my librarians, the barista at the single coffee shop, and on and on. There is a ton of friction and things aren't particularly run very well, nor is there much investment locally, but there is meaning. This is ours, no one is coming to save us. There is that sense of ownership and love for something (a community) that is a bit rough around the edges.
I wonder if there is the element of time to settle into a place, and also perhaps layered on with age (I'm starting to push my late 30s and I can also tell my expectations around so many things are shifting). Curious to hear if others have thought about this.
Thank you for sharing! I didn't mention aging in this piece, but I probably should have, as I think that's a factor too. You just have less energy to be striving all the time! However, I will say that doesn't seem to apply to everyone. Some people age, but don't get better at accepting stuff.
I have! I could have written this comment if I could express myself so beautifully. Just replace semi-rural Maine with Abruzzo, a semi-rural Italian region where I was born and returned after 15 years abroad and over 20 away…
I believe four years is the magic number, sounds like that's about when you started feeling settled :) I'm currently back in Seattle, where I grew up, after spending many years on the East Coast and abroad in college and beyond. I never intended to move back here (COVID brought us back) or stay (but it has been nice having family around with young kids) and I still want to move back East or abroad, BUT we have been back ~4 years now and I do have that feeling now of being pretty settled.
I always wanted to travel when I was younger. But buying a house when I was 30 put the end to that dream. I find as I have aged that there are comforts I like, a good chair to read and knit, a nice cotton blanket, food, peace and quiet. I did eventually move from the east coast to Texas for financial reasons, and I hated the actual state that I lived in, too much of a caste system even there. Steel workers verses bankers.
When I moved I knew that I would need to adapt, compromise, forget how I lived “back east” because living in Texas is unique. One of the things you must do wherever you go is the ability to compromise. Now going to a local grocery store is a one hour drive one way, our library is in the midst of a lawsuit and hasn’t bought books or any materials in six years. There are two factions fighting and both have lost more than they will ever gain. We trade books, and dvds. We have for profit hospitals, and I am not sure I get quality care. We are on our own, we know that there is no government agency that can deal with cattle ranchers, a small city community, and people who can’t support a good grocery store. Each has unique issues. You deal with it. You also chip in for school supplies even if you don’t have kids. You drop off extra produce, eggs, cucumbers, donated to the fish fry, bbq to support the firehouse, do a stint at the food stand at the football game. You check on the elderly, this is your new life.
When I wake up at night, I can see billions of stars outside my window.
This was a wonderful read, thank you so much. I always feel that social media orients us in a world that doesn’t physically exist and is bigger than we can comprehend. It’s unsettling and anxiety inducing. Whenever that existential off-ness kicks in, I find all I need to do is re-orient myself to my immediate surroundings and that tethering helps me feel “real” again. I think what you’ve written about reminds me of this experience on a grand, life, and global scale. Maybe re-orienting oneself in a single, geographic coordinate can help a person feel real and significant again.
Love this comment—captures so much of what I have realized after getting off of social media last year
I'd recommend finding some of Stephen Jenkinson's work on belonging to a place, it would resonate with what you mention at the end! To be of service to a place can create a sense of connection and belonging - could this be how we find meaning? Tending a garden, a neighbor, our path to school, etc.
Loooooove Jenkinson!
do you have any recs on this? I’m interested!!
Thank you for the rec!
This is filled with such wonderful insight about the opportunity costs of mobility and optionality. When I was younger, I wanted to model Wendell Berry’s deep attachment to place. Then that place really decayed with regard to job opportunity and safety, and it made sense to leave. Which was painful, but I did. And the move turned out to be a very solid decision. One of the biggest challenges of the current regime/current events is that it’s putting into play not only changing cities (which is hard enough) but also countries. The stakes are so much higher!
Thanks for such a thoughtful essay.
Thank you! It's funny you should mention Berry. I was just reading The Work of Local Culture yesterday! (After finishing this piece)
Wendell Berry speaks and writes with such persistent integrity and authenticity. I was able to hear him in person reading his own work once - I’m so glad I did.
As I was in the midst of this whole go/stay set of decisions myself, I came across his poem “What We Need Is Here.”
And boy was it ever addressing the heart of the matter!
Berry has had the option for a good way forward over a lifetime in Henry County, Kentucky.
But what about those of us who aren’t so fortunate in a choice of place? When is the opportunity cost of staying too high?
https://www.poeticous.com/wendell-berry/what-we-need-is-here
Do you have a recommendation for a book of Berry’s?
Yes, and thank you so much for asking: The Unsettling of America (1977)
Thank *you* so much!
What an excellent piece. We've ended up doing some version of this backwards and wrong as, in our early 40s, we bought a sailboat and now travel as nomads with our two kids in tow. The lifestyle has more than enough friction, but also odd moments of the sort of travel lifestyle fantasy you see on the internet. While it is never easy, this piece made me doubly grateful that we live as nomads the way we do - with the messiness of family and moving a floating piece of fiberglass around with us while calling it home. I'll be sitting with one for a while as I think through various reactions to it. Really appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
Sailboat sounds pretty high friction to me!
Thank you for this essay, I resonate so much with it! Even though I have never lived a digital nomad-esque life (albeit also having lived in different countries including Lisbon, which has to be one of my favourite places in the world- with all its shortcomings) much of what I have been thinking about lately goes along the lines of how we get less and less good at dealing with friction, facing adversity. I think so much energy goes into avoiding discomfort instead of sitting with it- and we all kind of know that that doesn’t really work in the long run. As life gets more and more convenient, I wonder if it also just gets less .. meaningful? And not actually as much easier?
Yup. I was the first person in my field with a Palm Pilot, adopted spreadsheets for managing my municipal budgets, e-mail for communications, all in the last century. And then, 3-4 years ago, pitched my upgraded 'smartphone' figuratively into the wood chipper (along with the Alexa thing that seemed so clever), retired into a 100-year-old-bungalow in a declining industrial river city in NW Illinois. I get around on my old Raleigh bicycle for 90% of my, ehm, getting around. I'm settling here. I'm improving my wood shed and garden this summer.
I, too, thought here of Wendell Berry. It's been 3-4 years ago somebody stuck a copy of "Hannah Coulter: A novel of the Port William Membership" in my hands, and for over a month or so we read it aloud at bed time, often finishing with my big blue handkerchief under my glasses and at my nose, as the stories jogged so clearly what's been lost in the time I've been of age. This passage stuck with me, and is relevant here, in which Hannah, twice widowed, sees changing about her town, her community, her relationships;, changing almost inexorably. It rhymes well with Iris Dement's "My Town", too:
"The old neighborliness has about gone from it now. The old harvest crews and their talk and their laughter at kitchen tables loaded with food have been replaced by machines, and by migrant laborers who eat at the store. The old thrift that once kept us alive has been replaced by extravagance and waste. People are living as if they think they are in a movie. They are all looking in one direction, toward a 'better place', and what they see is no thicker than a screen." (pge 179)
Your writing is 'collapse aware', and more. The World, and The Machine which would own it, consume it and turn it all into commodity and money, is spinning faster and faster, and I don't think the connecting rods and pistons can take much more. I have wood to split and stack. Winter's coming. Thanks for what you bring to us. Hold fast.
Tim Long, Just up the Hill from Lock 15.
This made me think of a friction “tradeoff”. That sometimes one needs to accept “worthwhile” friction (eg the physical and mental toll of moving to and settling in a new place, and in my case learning a new language and culture) to reduce “unwanted” friction (eg difficulty in accessing community/support) and enable the emergence of whatever it is we value most and choose to prioritise. Living in Seoul is not perfection. After almost a year here I still experience a lot of cultural friction and probably always will to some extent. But it’s a good learning experience and in any case, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I like my friction tradeoff :)
Thanks Rosie for articulating some of my own complicated thoughts about the same things that you discuss here!
This quest for perfection or something like it was partly what led me to leave the UK (I left for a job and for a relationship, both not great reasons in the end 😆), but it fed into something in my mind that I would feel like I 'belonged' somewhere eventually. But I was always chasing something else. I have now bounced between a few countries and jobs but have lived in Asia for 11 years. Where I live is not perfect by any means from a number of different angles, but sometimes you just have to commit to stuff - a place and the people. In some ways, you have make peace with the choices that you make and yes, choose to ignore (or again, make peace with) certain things.
I know that this is easier said than done when it comes to other structural stuff like politics; culture; language and so on (certainly, having certain passports help too because you know that you can leave).
Great piece❣️As a third culture kid/adult, I thrive in chaos and friction, finding it keeps me high on adrenaline. Even having babies didn't cure that jitter; I was always moving around with them. Until my youngest turned seven, she'd had enough. She said, "Mummy, we don't want to move anymore, it's tiring." Her words resonated deeply, forcing me to finally stay in one place. Now that my children are turning into young adults, I crave starting over again somewhere new, perhaps reconnecting with my roots in Asia, even though Europe also feels like home. I'm currently living in the Netherlands. I know better than to believe Utopia exists, and going back to Ithaca seems absurd when you don't have Penelope or Telemachus waiting for you. Yet the feeling of restlessness is still there, and I keep reminding myself that wherever I go, I take myself with me, imperfections and all. Finding true contentment is easier said than done for someone like me.