When You Can’t Settle on a Place to Settle Down
And you feel like time’s running out.
Today, I googled, “Where should I settle down?”
As it turns out, you can’t just Google what to do with the rest of your life.
It was a desperate attempt to find the answer to a question that has been plaguing me for months. Sadly, the tools we usually employ to look up our most asked questions fell short this time. As it turns out, you can’t just Google what to do with the rest of your life.
Choosing where to settle down is a deeply personal decision, and one that is never clear-cut or obvious. You can absorb as many anecdotes from other people’s experiences to try and inspire your decision, but they will never fully suffice.
Why decide now?
Why do I feel the need to make this hugely significant decision that affects the rest of my life now?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I quietly and stealthily turned thirty this year.
Thirty — the year that many consider to be an “adulthood deadline,” by which you needed to have Gotten Your Sh*t Together. It’s an age our parents and those of previous generations use as a barometer to measure “success” compared to their own timelines. An age that has produced immense anxiety for those of us laying down the groundwork of our lives well into our thirties.
My thirtieth birthday happened this past May, when most of us were aggressively hunkering down in our homes, and Zoom hadn’t fully exhausted us yet. I didn’t get the big celebration I envisioned for myself. Instead, I booked an AirBnB in Southern California, and treated myself to a low-key road trip, a few poolside days, and some champagne.
For the first few months of my thirties, I didn’t have the life crisis I was anticipating. It felt drastically more important to devote mental resources to the protests and crises our country was facing, instead. Now, things have started to calm down a bit (though said issues are still important as ever), and cities have begun finding a middle ground of normalcy. In this new era of 2020, I find myself shifting back into selfish fussing about my future.
I am miles away from anything I could’ve anticipated for myself by thirty. I’m just now settling down in my career. I’m in a long-term relationship, but still unmarried, and with no children — a mind-bender for someone who grew up Catholic. More importantly, I still feel as if I’m floating around the US, trying to find my footing somewhere.
Along with turning thirty, the pandemic is drastically changing the landscape of the already-transient city I live in. Quarantine has become a catalyst for people who were already considering leaving San Francisco. Unfortunately for me, more than half of my fledgling group of friends falls into this category.
People are starting to make longer-term plans. It’s inevitable that my partner and I should begin reflecting on our own.
So, how does one go about making such a daunting decision?
I’m starting with what I know.
The pressure to make such a long-lasting decision can be extremely overwhelming. How am I supposed to know what needs I will have in fifteen, twenty, or thirty years? I barely even know what I’ll need next week.
So, to begin, I started reflecting on the last decade in my life. While my twenties didn’t provide conclusive answers to every big life question, they did bring me a lot of insights. At the very least, I knew there were a few things I couldn’t live without.
I’m originally from Miami. I currently live in San Francisco. Before that, I was in Portland for a number of years, and before that, in Washington, D.C. I’ve had to start from scratch in every new place I’ve lived. With the exception of my significant other, I rarely had an established network of people waiting to welcome me with open arms.
As such, one major lesson I learned in my twenties was that proximity to some family and friends is a must have for my long-term future. I’d like to never start completely from scratch again, if I can help it.
Unfortunately for me, making a decision based on the whereabouts of friends who are just as much in limbo as me makes things difficult. Even my family isn’t 100% sure where they will end up, once my parents fully retire. If my number one, most important factor is constantly changing, how am I supposed to make my own decision?
Still, knowing this gives me a starting point to reflect on. With this consideration as my north star, I can start to fill in the pieces from the other insights I’ve gathered.
No one place is going to be perfect.
In an ideal world, I would settle down somewhere affordable, with my family and close friends close by. We’d all be able to walk to local shops and restaurants. The schools in our area would be top-notch. The sun would shine most of the year, and it would never snow or get humid and muggy. My partner and I would be able to thrive in our careers, and would have offices to pop into nearby — with work from home options, of course. Our commutes would be smooth, and less than fifteen minutes. It would be safe enough to have a family. And I’d be surrounded by the culture I grew up around, so that my kids could feel that same pride in their identities that I have.
The reality is that no one place can meet every single one of your needs.
Unfortunately, such a city does not exist, and will likely never exist. For me, the Pacific Northwest is too rainy. San Francisco is too transient (among other problems). LA has too much traffic. And everywhere remotely “big city” is out-of-control expensive. The reality is that no one place can meet every single one of your needs. This becomes especially complicated when you’re not the only one whose opinion is in the mix.
Once you accept that no city is perfect, and that you will always have to make trade-offs, you can start to define which of those trade-offs are tough, but manageable, and which ones are total deal-breakers. Unfortunately, there is never an obvious answer. Oftentimes, you won’t know until you’ve lived it for yourself. But as long as you’re making the effort to explore these options, you’re one step closer to finally figuring it out.
Long-term doesn’t mean forever.
Amid my decision paralysis, I began to ask myself: What was I truly trying to accomplish by “settling down?” I began to realize that I didn’t necessarily want to trade in my city life for the ‘burbs, turn in my metro card for highways and driving, or get going starting that family. Really, I just wanted to plant down roots somewhere. I’ve been in limbo for so many years of my adult life. In any city that I’ve lived in, I’ve always had one foot out the door, anticipating my next move.
I was tired of planning for my next step. I wanted to pick a city, mentally commit to it, and start forming a community.
What has helped ease my anxiety is accepting that at some point, what I’ve chosen as my forever place might have to change one more time. And that’s completely OK.
Maybe there is a middle ground to explore between settling down and just settling in.
I started to rephrase the question I was asking myself. What if instead of choosing a place to settle down for the rest of my life, I narrowed my focus down to the next five years? This timeline was still in the realm of “long-term decisions,” but it didn’t feel so final or permanent. It took the pressure off of figuring everything out for the rest of forever.
In the end, just because you’re thirty doesn’t mean you need to rush figuring out the remaining unsettled factors of your life. That might, after all, be an impossible task. Things in life will never fully, magically fall into place and feel completely “settled.” People are dynamic, ever-changing, always evolving human beings, and your wants and needs now might change again in a few years. Maybe there is a middle ground to explore between settling down and just settling in.
But at some point, for many of us nomadic folk, the constant transience does becomes exhausting. Eventually, it makes sense to pick a place, commit to it, and become at peace with it for the foreseeable future.
I still have no idea where I’m going to settle in for the next few years. Maybe it’s where I currently live. Maybe there’s a big move in our future. I truly don’t know. And I think that’s OK. The important thing is that I’m putting in the work to figure it out, and being intentional with my choices going forward.
Through good, old fashioned self-reflection, and perhaps spending more time in the places I’m considering, I can take the pressure off and enjoy the decision-making process. If you find yourself in a similar spot in life, I hope you’ll take the pressure off of yourself, as well. Things will happen in due time. And when you get there, it’ll be worth it.
