At the end of March 2020, I made a snap decision to embark on a cross-country journey driving 1,800 miles in three days from what was at the time, the epicenter of COVID-19 in America — New York City. I arrived in the Hill Country in Texas between Austin and San Antonio, which turned out to be the start of a four month journey that brought me to New Orleans, Bonita Springs, Augusta, Arlington and finally, back to Midtown Manhattan. This was the start of a very eye opening experience that shined a bright light on how the demands of a full-time career in today’s society can distract us from what’s really important. I realized how much I was sacrificing my quality of life for self-imposed constraints, the ones that are etched into our cognition from the moment we are born by everyone and everything in our lives. The everyday mentality that for some reason we all silently agree to accept of “once I get this promotion, once I buy this house, once I make or save this much money, once I find my true love, etc.” I believe this has led us to sacrifice joy, happiness, adventure, and our precious time without much contemplation, operating like the software of a computer, the neural pathways engrained into our subconscious running predetermined code for every decision we make and everything we do.
My journey away from NYC reminded me of so many aspects to life that I had subconsciously discarded to be rediscovered in the future “when I had more time.” Some examples include:
- the value of spending time in nature and being outdoors every day, enjoying the abundance of beauty the Earth offers us that we so often manage to ignore and take for granted…beauty is not hard to find, but it’s easy to overlook
- the value of getting a full and replenishing night’s rest
- the value of not feeling insanely rushed in the morning to try and get to work on time, put my “costume” on to conform to society’s unquestioned mandates, all to sacrifice aspects of life that actually matter that allow me to feel and be well inside
- the value of meditating, breathing deeply, and sitting in silence for more than just a few minutes when I wake up instead of doing it just to check another thing off my never ending to-do list (or the subconscious impulse to spend the first 30 waking minutes on my phone amping up my brain)
- the value of working through a yoga practice at my own pace
- the value of journaling and reflecting on the day’s activities, conversations, and new memories created
- the value of reading some philosophy or spiritual teachings in the morning to catalyze deeper contemplation of the day ahead
- the value of listening to a podcast or an audiobook that feeds your soul, your body, your brain, and creates excitement
- the value of taking a walk to get your blood flowing, your muscles loose, some vitamin D from the sun, and smell and see and hear and feel Mother Nature’s aliveness
- the the value of prioritizing all of these things over starting work 30 minutes, an hour, or even two later, eliminating the early morning involuntary and unnoticed hormonal dumps via unnecessary elevated stress and anxiety levels
I have rediscovered what it’s like to think positive, be healthy and feel ready for the day through these practices. I start work between 9–930A instead of 630–7A, and it has had zero impact on my ability to get my work done. The main result has been a vastly improved quality of life that includes more of what I want and need, and less of what I don’t. I view maximum “quality of life” as having the flexibility and power to make the choices you want in all aspects of your life every day — how, who, where and what to spend your time on.
I am a strong believer in the idea of time being our most precious resource, and yet very few people I know are thinking deeply about how they spend their time. In fact, when I ask most people about what they did a day or a week ago, they can identify very few details about how they are spending their time. Society has in some ways converted much of our “human nature” into robotic impulses. It’s even more puzzling when considering the collective consciousness of “time flies” and “life is short” and all the other iterations of this sentiment. How, who, what and where we choose to spend our time determines the quality of our lives.
This is to say that this experience has led me acknowledge the truth of my own reality. That there is no reason to wait for some arbitrary moment in the future to take agency over my life. The time is now. More money, a new relationship, a stronger business, a different job, a new family, more friends, material goods — none of it will ever be enough, especially not in the context of the values and tenets that have been cultivated in today’s age of consumerism, echo chambers, conformity, and the hedonic treadmill that masks humanity. What will be enough is growing to love myself with humility and learning to understand and communicate my thoughts, feelings, needs, and emotions — cultivating a true inner compass that allows me to live more freely and peaceful.
And so this is how I’ve landed on this idea of ‘The Great Relocation of the 2020’s’. Almost everyone I know has moved this year. And the ones who haven’t are talking about what their next move might be. U-Haul’s Migration Patterns below seem to indicate big movements from urban living to places that offer a more diverse set of daily activities and lifestyle. I wonder, if the things I enjoy most in life are being in nature, playing golf, waking up to sunshine, why it took me so long to question the fact I was living in a city that was cold 4–5 months of the year, had one of the highest costs of living in the world, charged 10+% in additional taxes, and offered very limited access to many of the things that bring playfulness to my life…
With this in mind, I imagine millions of people will move in the United States over the next decade. There are unending implications to this, like the rewriting of the political map, a total rethinking of state & local tax schemes (which many states will likely make the mistake of increasing vs. acknowledging the data which suggests it often leads to a net loss of tax revenues in the long run), etc. In a follow-up piece, I will share what I believe to be a thoughtful framework to determine where to move to optimize your for your situation. I created a process of which I solved for the maximum quality of life; given this is probably one of the most important decisions you will make in your life, I’d encourage blocking at least a day or two of device, work-free time to go through without distractions.
“The part of life we really live is small.’ For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca
