it is 88F and sunny. I am sitting in a park near the office on a glorious August afternoon. Relaxed people are dotted around, sitting in the shade and eating sandwiches and looking at the parade of New York City life. The tourists and the t-shirts and the suits and the squirrels all go by. I am ringed by trees and skyscrapers and the distant sound of taxis and music playing.
My other half was talking about the 'Medium Chill' article I posted the other day. The author deliberately chooses to live in a tumbledown house in a rougher area of Seattle, and does not feel the need to get more ambitious and acquisitive. It is not tuning out for him, it is not being countercultural. It is making a choice about what you value most. More time, less stuff.
It sounds good, marvellous in fact. We intrinsically have sympathy for the idea as a couple. it sounds all the better after vast consumer spending and debt binges have created economic disaster around the world. It is more environmentally sustainable as well, most likely.
But then again I write this on a park bench in Manhattan. We live in a nice apartment upscale part of town. There are few other places on earth more driven than New York. The rats run faster races here than anywhere else.
Why do we do it? What makes it worth it to live here? After all, we could have much more living space in most other places. We could have trees and grass of our own.
What is so compelling about living here then? We do love it. Every time I fly back to JFK, my heart still lifts when we round a curve on the Long Island Expressway coming into town and see the great forest of skyscrapers again.
But why shouldn't we downshift to a slower life somewhere quieter? We could manage it financially, to slow down and downshift significantly, work fewer hours. We could have just as many books and movies and art, and probably have time to enjoy them too.
We love being at the center of things, I suppose - where history is happening, where there is always something new, where you feel energized just by looking around. We love living next to the greatest art galleries, the wonderful concerts and opera and restaurants - although sometimes when we are tired we have to make an extra effort to go out and take advantage of them. Energy is in short supply on Saturday mornings after the week too. You need energy to take advantage of all the opportunities.
We evidently have an extra need for stimulation and experience. We are curious and love books and travel as well. We want to know things and experience things. It is our instinctive view of the good life.
We have often discussed as a couple the fact that experiences make you more happy than more money. So it makes sense we live where peak experiences crash in like ocean waves. New York is the capital of experience, gushing and cascading and flowing in great torrents. Tranquility would just seem to...slow, too much the same.
We like having good careers. We are well paid and successful, although we haven't been willing to make huge sacrifices of time and freedom to get to the very top.
But it isn't primarily the career at is the attraction to living here. Neither of us have changed jobs in a long time. In some ways in that sense we might be better off in Washington or Boston or London. We like to spend time together rather than more time in the office.
Why here? It is the connection, the networks and cross-fertilization - but most people in cities have their own circles and don't mix quite as much as urban theorists think.
It is the ability to walk to the Metropolitan Museum - but in some ways the most interesting art is not here in expensive Manhattan.
Maybe talking about the future of the economy is a bit like talking about different places to live. The world may evolve to become more like San Francisco is now - or Lagos. People used to believe the future happened in California first. Not so much any more.
There is such variety of lives just based on place: between New York and Barcelona's Eixample, houses on Oahu's North Shore, North Vancouver, medieval central Siena. Or rural Vancouver Island out towards Port Renfrew. Or upstate New York near the Andirondacks. Why do people choose to live where they do, and why do they choose to move?
A lot of it must be inertia. Some, particularly in older societies, is a sense of rootedness, of belonging to a community - which is not really a New York thing at all. Some of it is nostalgia, personal history and meaning in this place where we have lived much of our lives. Places are lived stories, our own stories and stages and props and poems.
Some of the limits are obviously about money - attractive places cost more to live, and can become prohibitive. But what makes attractive places? Everyone agrees Paris is more attractive than Cleveland, but after that there is plenty of room for disagreement.
Some of it is avoiding commuting, certainly for us. We don't want to spend three hours a day on I-95 and the Merritt Parkway, like some people we know.
You come to love the things that ARE good about where you are. We don't think about our small apartment, but do thrill at walking home in SoHo after an excellent meal. Still, the material circumstances are more and more similar over time. If you live in the country, you are glad to escape the noise and the lack of fresh air and crowds of the city.
We certainly yearn sometimes at this time of year for our own backyard and grill. but for today at least I can sit here in the park at lunchtime.
Until I have to go back inside to my desk.
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