I've been losing friends and finding peace

Instead of getting good at getting more, needing less

Ever since I was a kid, I didn’t move around much. For about the first twenty years of my life, I lived in Boston. For the next four years I lived in Pittsburgh. Now I’ve been in San Francisco for over 2 years. But in the last 4 months I have been constantly moving around, never in one place for even more than a month. This big departure from how I’m used to living has helped me learn a lot and really put a lot of what is around me in perspective. Here is what I have gained from this experience so far:

Instead of getting good at getting more, needing less

Getting Good at Getting More

When I first got to San Francisco I spent months building a community, finding my friends, and trying to get comfortable at work. It took me two years to finally feel like everything had come together and my hard work had paid off. Two years I spent trying to learn how to shape my environment to be the way I wanted it to be (the way Rick from Rick and Morty created his own planet to be able to go to the bathroom the way he wanted to). Put another way, my whole life so far including San Francisco has been about getting good at getting what I want: more friends, more respect at work, more impact, having more fun. 

Learning to get by with less

When I started moving around more (which was a semi-unintentional result of leaving work), I tried to continue this pattern. When I was in NYC for a month, I tried to build back my friendships in the area. Even when I was in London for just four days, I searched for a new coffee shop to become my place of staple comfort in the area. But after a while of repeating this exhausting process of trying to build what I wanted in every new place I went, I decided to give up and let go (as a side note, I’ve always disliked the phrase letting go, as it was so ambiguous as to what it means). For me it meant to stop trying. To just show up somewhere and let whatever happens happen.

If I met someone interesting, great and if I did not also fine. Instead of trying to build back a false sense of the familiarity you miss when you leave home, I got more used to being unfamiliar at a place. No point in trying to grasp being known when you’ll be starting over next month and be unknown again. Instead I was fine with just letting go of my ego, being in the background, and letting my day take me where it wants to take me. No use yelling about who I am and stamping my identity into a new place. To just soak up and understand the identity of where I am so I can take that with me was enough.

In essence, what starting over in a new place over and over again helped teach me is that instead of getting good at getting more, what I really needed to do was get comfortable with having less. When I say having less I do mean having less stuff since all you have is what you can fit in a suitcase when you are moving around, but I also meant less of everything else. You don’t have your heavy reputation to maintain, the expectation of others for you to be a certain way, the expectation of yourself to make some massive impact when you are only in a place for a month. I think this is why so many people love travel, it’s not just the novelty or getting a break from work, it is about how travel enables you to be in the moment through giving you a temporary excuse to shed all the heavy things you carry around with you and travel light. 

Admitting I could get by with less was hard

As I mentioned in the post No Solutions, Only Trade-Offs, for the longest time I was not really been a fan of the idea of trying to make do with less. It felt like it meant giving up on yourself, giving up on the idea of being able to have it all, to be good enough to have strong relationships, do deep and meaningful work, and pursue new and exciting things. Like why don’t you think you can do this, believe in yourself, you just have to be more clever or try harder, things can get even better, you can have even more. 

What I am coming to terms with is that needing less is not about giving up, but instead about being more ambitious in a whole new way. It is not that you no longer pursue doing work that you are proud of or good relationships, but just that you decrease your need to have it all, to still be fine without it, that is what you gain. 

It’s like this old saying:

“the more things you own, the more things own you.”

All that you try to gain comes with a burden and again this goes for the physical stuff as well as everything else. If you buy a home, you have to maintain it. If you do great work and earn a stellar reputation, then you now carry the weight of having to act worthy of that reputation in order to keep it. All of this stuff is a spinning plate to keep up in the air. When you leave a place, you have to choose what plates are worth continuing to spin and let the rest crash down. 

Moving helps you learn what’s precious to you … and what’s not

When you own a place you choose what to throw and keep the rest, but when you move around you have to choose what to keep and throw the rest and what keeps getting kept is what you realize to be truly precious. This helps you realize how much stuff that you don’t need and that you don’t miss once it’s gone. With each item you learn to live without you become a little lighter. I know that I have just started on my journey and will one day want to build all these meaningful roots in a place and take joy in all these spinning plates, but to feel freedom and weightlessness of having so few plates spinning is such a novel and amazing feeling that I’m glad I’m able to at least know what it feels like. 

Another great benefit that has come from moving around so much has been being able to learn to appreciate what you have. When you lose something and you do not miss it, you become free from it. But when you lose something and you do miss it, you realize how important it is. Especially if it is something you can’t seem to find in the numerous other places you look. 

Friendship is a great example of this. I knew I loved my friends back home, but what I did not know was how hard it was to go even one week without them while I was in London and knew no one. It took me two days to miss them sorely. I realized that even when I did not see them for a week at home, the psychological comfort of knowing they were around was invaluable. I realized how draining it was to search and build connections with strangers (like finding a new table to sit at during lunch in middle school), and how I had taken for granted simply not worrying about this at home.

Another great example is privilege. Being born in one of the richest countries in the world is embarrassingly easy to take for granted until you go somewhere else and get sick, or even just have to go to the bathroom. It allows us to get just a glimpse of all the invention, policy, strife, and progress that helped our privileged world be the only one we knew.

Putting it All Together

As anyone who reads this newsletter knows, I am obsessed with happiness. How to live a good life and be happy is something I am endlessly curious about. So far there is a lot I have learned about how to get more out of your life and be happier:

• live close to your friends

• get a hobby that lets you hone your craft

• find a community which shares your values, but opens the door to new ideas and people

• build a great relationship with yourself

• Do not undersell the importance of having fun and not taking yourself too seriously

• … and much more (coming soon)

However, as we have just discussed, happiness and fulfillment are not just about adding more, but also needing less. Just as with the luggage you carry around for your physical needs, the luggage you carry around for your emotional and self-esteem needs can weight you down or make you feel as light as a breeze depending on how much you carry.

Being forced to choose what to take and what to leave also helps you appreciate all you have. It can be really unintuitive, but for me I thought the path to fulfillment was like this:

Over time, through talent and effort you build systems of fulfillment: a job that allows you to feel like your contributing to something important, a relationship that makes you feel loved, a community of artists to help you nurture your creative side, whatever it is for you. Gaining all of these wonderful new joys to chase after makes you more fulfilled until a point where you just plateau and are left wondering what else you need to get to reach the goal (although Buddhism and Biology teach us there no ideal "goal” state and that this exists just to motivate us towards a behavior). But instead of the straight and simple green line path, the path to fulfillment may end up looking more the red line below:

You have to take a lot of steps back to take the next step forward. In order to truly appreciate all that you have and have built (or that already existed), you need to lose it. There is simply no other way to cherish it. You need to remember back to what it is like to live without it. But losing it all is not meant to just be punishment to help you appreciate it, it is also a form of growth to not be too dependent on having this and that and just be ok with being by yourself.

While it has been so rewarding to learn how to and then build a home in San Francisco, what travel (and just life) has taught me is that change is always just around the corner and while you should cherish what you have, you should not cling to it too desperately. As Art in the Grand Canyon taught me, to draw, erase, and re-draw is a joy of life.

While it may seem as though we are being punished as Sisyphus is to roll the boulder up the hill over and over again, with each blank canvas we get to chance to realize that each time is not the same. Though the canvas may always seem blank, the person staring it was not the same as the slightly more confused person who was staring it the last time. With each time we start over in life, the heavy loss of what we left behind reminds us of how much it mattered in the first place and how much it will always continue to matter to us.

This is where I am right now. After two years spent building a home in San Francisco, I’m leaving it all to experience the world and let go. Will it be the biggest mistake of my life or a circuitous way to get where I want to go? I’m honestly not sure, but excited to find out.