Sharing from my personal blog: https://spiralprogress.com/2024/11/16/the-grass-is-always-greener-in-the-environment-that-shaped-your-values/

As a college student, I spent a few wonderful months living in New York. It was a remarkable summer, the first time I had lived on my own, and the first summer I had a bit of my own money to live like an adult and get out into the world. My existence felt marked by serendipity, delirium, and opportunity.

After graduating, I moved to San Francisco for work, and felt for that first year, endlessly disappointed. BART is worse than the MTA. Golden Gate Park is worse than Central Park. SF MoMA is much worse than the original MoMA.

During this time, I incessantly fantasized about packing up and moving back to New York the moment my equity vested.

This feeling persisted until, speaking to a friend who had made the same move, and was lamenting it in the same way, I took the benefit of distance to reflect on my thoughts and realize how deluded they were. It was only then that I understood San Francisco was not a worse version of New York. It was a different city altogether.

Though San Francisco could not compete with New York on the things that made New York special, it had its own charms and appeals. It was the best place in the world to meet interesting people who were earnestly and diligently working to build new and exciting things. It had incredible access to California’s national parks which I still feel are amongst the greatest natural wonders anywhere in the world. While New York seemed to go on forever such that every place in the five boroughs felt like, a different but still very New York New York, San Francisco offered easy access to the calm suburbs and garage startups of South Bay, the dynamic intellectual and culinary scene in Berkeley, and the opulent wineries of Napa.

I refocused on my surroundings, learned to appreciate what I had, and stayed in California for another decade. It wasn’t until years later thinking about this shift that I came to understand the broader lesson.

Changing my attitude was not merely about tilting my head and seeing things from a new perspective. It is understanding the obvious-in-hindsight point that if you want to compare your new situation to a previous one, you should not evaluate it only on the axes that were already salient to you.

This applies to many areas of life including jobs, relationships, and homes.

Sometimes I hear friends (or strangers on the internet) talk about having kids, and they seem to be making this same mistake. They can, as non-parents, only conceive of the things that they will lose and the ways their lives will become impoverished. It is much harder to imagine what opportunities lie on the other side.

Prospective parents look at the transition and think “sleep with kids is worse than sleep without kids”, “going out to dinner with kids is worse than going out to dinner without kids”, and so on. They are looking through the lens of the values they already hold and fixated on the activities they already enjoy.

I previously wrote about normal and revolutionary progress. Normal progress is when things get better along the existing lines. Revolutionary progress is when entirely new lines are drawn. That is not a diss against normal progress, but it is a reminder that these modes of change are different, and it is a mistake to try to evaluate either as if it were the other.

A new job might have a worse commute, that will make you miss the old one. A new home might come with street noise that will have you wishing you’d never moved. A new child might have you up at 4am thinking about how badly you squandered the luxury of being able to sleep whenever you wanted to.

It is good and worthwhile to feel these things, and appreciate what you had and to reflect on your own values. But that nostalgia also risks blinding you from what’s valuable today, in this moment, under the new set of conditions that shape your life.

That same friend has since moved back to New York. Her favorite thing about living in California was getting to enjoy fresh stone fruit every summer. Now in New York she imports nectarines from across the country. And of course it is not the same. Part of the joy of California is the careless abundance of it all, the way you can pick up a Nectarine and bite into it without paying for expedited shipping. Even as she enjoys the transit, park and museums, some part of California both tempts and elludes her.

The city she’s returned to is not the same city she left. For the truly nostalgic, not even New York City can compete with the memory of itself.