The fresh start fallacy

Wherever you go, there you are

One rainy day last summer, my partner and I were in a pub while the grandparents watched our then-one year old. We were talking about the future, which is something that takes on a different tenor when you have a child.

All of a sudden, you are not making decisions purely out of your own comfort or desires. In one way, it’s harder and involves more responsibility. In another way, it comes as a relief to no longer have to consider your own personal happiness as paramount to everything else.  

We’d been dancing around it for a long time. Small complaints about where we were living. Noticing that we didn’t really have any friends we saw on a regular basis. Realizing we were playing the un-winnable game of living far away from family while being two working parents raising a child. Noticing how often we found ourselves with very little to do in our seaside town, with nothing open for long stretches of the year — or things that do at very odd hours that seem hostile to commerce. Finally, we no longer felt a need for the geographic proximity to London we were paying a real estate premium for.

I can’t remember who said it aloud first, but once we did, it couldn’t be unsaid: Maybe we should just … move closer to where there is more help?

Moving is ostensibly not a big deal. I’ve done it way too many times. Perhaps because of that, I am inoculated against the idea that moving somewhere new will solve all my problems. In fact, my husband and I are similar in the fact that we have both, separately and before we met one another, done many of the things that people do when they want to blow up their lives and become a new and improved version of themselves.

We’ve moved countries, quit jobs, taken lovers in faraway cities. We’ve lived out of suitcases, road-tripped to self actualization, and avoided having office jobs for impressive stretches of time. We’ve eaten, prayed, and loved. We know how that story usually ends. 

This isn’t depressing to me, nor defeatist, nor an excuse to never change things. If you read this newsletter, you know I love when people radically change their lives. But one of the strengths of our relationship is that neither of us are under the illusion that the problem is out there. We know the problem is us. We spent our respective decades trying all the things in better climates and different time zones and we know on the other side of that you’re still stuck with your same old shit. As the saying goes: Wherever you go, there you are. 

So for that reason, the admission that we needed to move felt risky to me. That afternoon in the pub, we were agreeing to take on months of disruption and hard work. Preparing a flat to sell, selling it, finding a house in a different part of the country, buying it — all of which, in this funny country known as England, take an absurd amount of time and rely on a feudal-era system that could only be less efficient if correspondence were carried out by Harry Potter owls.

Then there was the packing up, changing our son’s entire childcare routine, setting up a new house. The expense, the labor, the uncertainty, while still working enough to pay for it all. What if it all felt the same on the other side?

Plus, we’d both already done our sensible starting over moves five and four years before. Margate, the artsy coastal town just 90 minutes from London where we met, was supposed to be the place that worked. After all that toiling in London under the illusion that success/money/fame was the thing we were looking for, we’d found each other here after eschewing careers we both felt burned by.

Of course, it did work in many ways. It resulted in my literal family, which is something I didn’t even know I wanted when I arrived. It was a soft place to land in the tumult of the pandemic, when everything felt extremely confusing and pointless. The tides, the light, the long summer days, and harsh winter gales reminded me that I am a cyclical creature just like every other living thing. (I really needed that reminder.)

But that day in the pub, we just had to admit it wasn’t working anymore. Life is hard, but it had been feeling harder than it needed to. So we decided to make a change. 

*** 

A few months after that afternoon, when we were well into the roughly ten month process of moving north, I wrote the essay The Friendship Problem, which brought many of you here. 

I’ll admit that when I wrote the piece, I didn’t realize how big of a statement I was making. I was both shocked and heartened to learn that so many people felt the same as me. And in fact, the overwhelming reader reaction to that piece helped me see that what we are seeking from this move — more help, more connection, less fabulousness and perhaps more friction — was in fact what many of us are craving. That so many of you are looking for that too felt like little nudge from the universe in our direction of travel.

One thing many millennials readers in particular seemed to respond to in the piece was the idea of constantly starting over. New job, new city, new relationship. How exhausting it was to constantly have to learn a new place, start a new life, be a new person, meet new people. And it is. One part of me is so good at this, I barely notice I’m doing it. Another can’t believe I’m doing that again after doing it four years ago.

But what has felt different this time is that I’m not expecting some new and improved version of myself as a result of moving. I feel motivated by a different set of values this time, ones that expect less of me, not more. I know that there are still a lot of changes I need to make in order to make the life I’m trying to lead a reality. A life where I have more rest, more capacity to help others, lower expectations of myself, and a higher degree of autonomy over how I spend my time — but also more people who might need it.

We are only a few weeks into this new fresh start, and the weeks have not been easy, of course. As the dust settles, my mind is zinging with all the ways this new life might be different, tempted by this fresh start fallacy.  But I know the work ahead is my own. It will be slow, plodding, non linear, and the progress will mostly be found in tiny small moments rather than ones I can broadcast to the world. I could have done that work on myself anywhere — including where I used to live — but it feels like we have a lot more things working in our favor now. We consider ourselves lucky that we were able to pull it off, able to see a thing about our lives that wasn’t working and make a change.

The first week we arrived, every single one of our neighbors came over to introduce themselves, with cards, flowers, and chat. Many have lived here for decades. I was speaking to my next door neighbour about where he’d placed his raised vegetable beds — in the front of the house where there is the most sunlight throughout the day — and how I was thinking about doing the same. 

It’s not only the light, he told me. Gardening out front means you get to have more conversations with people passing by. I realized that was just what I had been looking for.

Things I enjoyed reading

• If you haven’t yet read Jonathan Haidt’s indictment of the phone-based childhood, it’s very worth your time. I’m very persuaded by his assertion that we over-protect kids in the real world and under-protect them online. [The Atlantic]

• “Over the first few months the store was open, I would find what my life had been missing: satisfaction. A level of fundamental happiness I hadn’t known was possible in the slog of my former life.” Speaking of life transformations, I was SO happy for the author by the end of this essay. [The Cut]

• What happens when people yoke their entire identities to a psychiatric condition or diagnosis? [The New Yorker]

• “The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer, nor the entire point of the piece, seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort.” People who read books to find moral clarity are missing the entire point. [NYT gift link]

• I’m really enjoying fellow Substacker

  David Spinks
  writing. (No relation that we know of!) Here’s one on the courage to be ordinary and another on what happens when we examine the “dirty fuel” powering our ambition.

• Did you read the unhinged age gap essay in The Cut? It almost made me nostalgic for the time when I used to scroll Twitter all day. I think

  Sara Fredman
  ’s response to it was pitch perfect. [Write Like a Mother]

• 101 ways to make and maintain friendships. Timely advice! [A social life, with friends]

Things I enjoyed listening to

• This is the first piece of media I’ve consumed about Ozempic that adequately addresses the unhealthy and industrialized food system in which our conversations about weight and diet play out. That in itself is telling. [Wild with Sarah Wilson]

• I really related to this journalist’s telling of what happened to her life when she stopped viewing the world through a lens of who deserves to be canceled and started allowing for complexity in the views of people she disagreed with. [Blocked & Reported]

Ask me anything

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Word Soup:

“Rituals cannot be uploaded or downloaded. They are sources of joy and stability in everyday life. Instead of the ceaseless quest for novelty embedded in scrolling, ritual offers the deeper satisfaction of mindful repetition.” -

Ted Gioia

“Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.” —Zen proverb

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