You Don't Need to Live in NYC to be Happy.

Another failure in logic when finding home.

Like many of my articles, a big part of why I’m writing this is for myself. That being said, I think longing is a normal part of the human condition, and we could all benefit from being a little more grateful, a little more rational, and a little more adventurous. If you enjoy these articles, and want to help me keep making them, subscribing and sharing this post does wonders.

The original title had something to do with a “city wishlist”, but I think the new one is catchier, and kind of gets to the crux of the issue — the feeling that life would be so much better elsewhere. (Which you’d know I struggle with if you follow me on Mastodon or Bluesky).

I sometimes spend an afternoon going down a combined Wikipedia, Google Maps, and social media video rabbit hole, looking at interesting areas, new and old, in some of the great charismatic cities of the world. This is often aided by some extremely annoying thing happening in the place I live, like some jerk throwing their litter on the ground, or bureaucratic government agencies taking too long to complete some project.

“Wow, look at these apartments in London, so close to the Thames, and they have two rail services within walking distance, and an amazing looking park…”

“Can you imagine living on the Long Island City Waterfront? You get amazing views of Manhattan, but you could also be there in minutes…”

“I wish I could have been born in Tokyo, it seems like there’s a lifetime of things to discover in Kichijoji, and Shimokitazawa, I can almost imagine strolling around on a warm summer evening…”

These kinds of improbable urban lifestyle aspirations are something I struggle with a lot. I could probably move to a lot of these places with enough determination, but even if I could, would I find affordable housing, a stable career? I often feel a bit sad that it feels like these incredible places are out of reach.

I think that a version of this can be expanded far far more broadly than to just the great global cities of the world. Sometimes even sitting in Toronto I fantasize about living in a great neighbourhood in Montreal, or Vancouver… or on the other side of Toronto.

It’s not always just about urbanism either. Sometimes I imagine how amazing my life (or my kids’ lives) might be if we lived in Los Angeles — imagine going to Disneyland on the regular, and all the incredible beaches; or Seoul, with its incredible metro system we could take trips across a huge chunk of Korea on a moment’s notice and do and see almost anything we wanted.

I remember a younger version of me, a little obsessed with theme parks, who seriously thought Toronto was some sort of holy land because unlike basically any other city in Canada (or on the west coast north of California) it had a “Six Flags”-style rollercoaster park. I wasn’t even that into rollercoasters, but clearly I’d go a lot if I lived in a place where I could just… go!

Probably the most prototypically Reece way this manifested was that I remember sitting in my (rather nice) bedroom as a teenager looking over the rural road our house fronted onto and thinking what I wouldn’t give to have a frequent bus that could take me anywhere I wanted to go, at a moment’s notice.

And there is the most important insight. While Reece circa 2012 would have given anything to have a bus that ran every 15 minutes, and looked like a regular city bus as opposed to a cutaway van, Reece circa 2025 has very similar feelings about living near a subway, or in London — ideally near the DLR.

This is crazy when you consider it. Reece today has access to several buses that come every few minutes and which run twenty-four hours a day. I even have a half decent train service. Clearly hedonic adaptation is a thing, but I think it goes a lot further than that.

The Grass Is More Interesting on the Other Side

A big part of the problem here is just classic “grass is greener”, but I think the effect goes further. Most people living in a great global city that’s somewhere towards the top of the liveability rankings know they have it pretty good. There is no war or famine, the environment is mostly clean, healthcare is available, so you know that at the low end your life isn’t going to really change if you live somewhere else.

Instead, I think that it’s just easy to imagine a sexy, adventurous, novel lifestyle in a foreign place, often the more foreign the better. I think a fairly high percentage of the appeal of a place like London to me (for example) is that even minor things look different than Canada. Boots is Shoppers Drug Mart, but that it is called something different somehow makes London feel better (when expanded to hundreds of Boots-like things) even in this tiny marginal way. I think it’s quite hard to ascertain what elements of another place are attractive because they are foreign and novel, and what is legitimately special. You could try living in both places, or talk to someone who has, but these are obviously imperfect solutions — one requires you to quite possibly spend a lot of time taste testing a new place to come around to realizing that it’s just another place, the other requires trusting that someone else’s way of looking at things will align sufficiently closely with your own.

What I can say is that I have played this game on a more local level, moving around within cities. Often you do end up liking the new place you live and that you fawned over for various reasons, but what I find is I am still usually nostalgic for places I’ve lived in the past. I think whats’ true is that it is easy to forget the downsides of a place when you leave it, and it’s easy to forget the upsides of a place when you’re swimming in them. I think in general people just tend to exaggerate the differences between places — and foreign countries just aid this by making the same fundamental things look different too.

Someone Probably Dreams of Living Where You Live

One helpful way of framing this problem is to consider that someone probably feels the same way about the place you live in, as you feel about other places. That could be a person living across town, but it could also be a person in another country (which may well not be blessed with the safety, prosperity, and clean environment that most people reading this get from their cities).

The idea is to not consider that this person exists — they do — but to instead think about the things that they might not actually love about where they live. I love London, but I think if I lived in London I would be pretty miffed that so many things closed so early, and this would probably be amplified with all the stuff closed on Sundays if I lived in a place like Berlin. I wrote about this a bit on my other blog.

Toronto Should Be Open Late.

This framing is useful, because even just writing this I am reminded that I rarely think about when stuff in Toronto closes, because it usually closes late enough to not be annoying to me. A lot of things in life are like that — when they function you don’t notice them, or appreciate them, they are neutral, when they are not to your liking they irritate!

Get Out and Enjoy

I think there are a few ways we can get over these brain worms. One would be to consider more regularly that when you’re doing something and it’s not causing you grief that that is cause for gratitude. Your local bus doesn’t usually get stuck in traffic? You don’t wait long to see your doctor? There are a lot of good food options near your home? This can help you start to appreciate the more benign neutral stuff.

Of course, life shouldn’t be neutral, and that’s why you have to actively try and get out in your city, town, or region and enjoy what it offers. If you’ve got great hiking and outdoor spaces — enjoy those. If you’ve got amazing urban sites, or historic places — visit them. And if your hometown has a unique cuisine, you should go get it from time to time!

A big reason that people have this feeling of longing for the places they vacation to (and as with much of this blog, I’m not the first to say this) is that people don’t live their regular lives like they live their vacations. Consider a day I spent in London with my wife: we get up after sleeping in a bit, and just decide to head to Wembley Stadium to walk around; we hop a train there, grab a coffee from a nice cafe and sit on a nice patio when walking around, and then we head on to the next place. I can say for certain that this is more laid back, more spontaneous, and more outgoing, than how I would live at home. Of course I enjoy London — I spent most of my time there having a good time! Now, half of the equation here is doing that kind of stuff in the place you already live, but it’s also recognizing that this isn’t really a sustainable thing to do in any place; most people have jobs and lack the energy to go out for 14 hours travelling around their city.

Still, we can do so much about this. Something I’m trying to do with my wife this year is go on a sort of staycation in a different hotel for a day every six months (and maybe more frequently in the future). Even with expensive hotels in the town I live in, I could do this several times per year and still have it cost less than a big international trip; it supports local business, it’s much less polluting, and honestly it leaves me happier with the place I live — I get to know the city better, and find new places to enjoy in the future.

We Overrate Things Beyond Our Neighbourhood

I know that I of all people really need to back up the assertion I seem to be dancing around, which is that "every city is good and where you live doesn’t matter a ton”; this obviously isn’t entirely true, but I do think a big proportion of how happy you are in any place is up to you. By recognizing the weak founding a lot of our feelings have, we can also start to be a bit more rational.

Probably the biggest thing I have not mentioned is that I think people overrate being proximal to things that are not core to their lives, and underrate the importance of much more boring things. Living in the same city as a rollercoaster park is a nice idea, and I do like it, but guess how many times I’ve visited in the decade I’ve lived here? Zero. Meanwhile, if I didn’t have a good community centre near me where I could go lane swimming, I’d probably be pretty upset, but I rarely look at whether random neighbourhoods in London or Tokyo have a good community centre!

Just in general, I think it’s easy to overrate things which are not in your immediate vicinity (say, a 15-minute bike ride) and underrate those which are. For example, living in a city with a “huge” metro system is awesome, especially on the occasion you use it; I remember when I first moved to Toronto I took the subway all over even when not necessary — often for the novelty, but now I use it when I need to. There’s a honeymoon period for everything, and while a lot of “amenities” really are nice, if they aren’t right where you live, you probably won’t use them very much. While I love going to London and riding the tube (London coming up a lot in this post…), if I lived there for a few years, maybe in a place without a tube station right near me, I’d probably be less excited about it.

Now, the downside of this is big. Places like London and Tokyo are a bit less amazing than it seems at first, but at the same time you can have many of the same things around you almost anywhere, from Edmonton, to Manchester, or Busan — being bigger does give cities truly unique amenities, but much of it is just giving you much more of the same. You can live in a great neighbourhood with a train running through it, a nice community centre, a convenient shop to buy groceries and the like almost anywhere.

Ultimately…

• Your city can give a lot, but you have to get out and engage to enjoy it.

• It’s easy to see the negatives in the places we live, and to not recognize the positives as they fade into the background.

• Mirroring this, it’s often easier to be more charitable to the downsides of another place (or miss them entirely) and strongly remember the positives (there’s probably some novelty attached).

• People often mistake novelty or difference for beauty, convenience, etc. it’s a lot easier to see the beauty in something you don’t see every day.