AE's Journal Round 6 - Navigating the Liminal Space

[AnalyticalEngine]

2024 Update

New yearly theme: The year of ACTION! The goal for this year is to find a way to turn my inner life into my outer life by more skillfully acting on emotions and desires.

How to make this happen? The biggest limiter in my life right now is my social network. I poured a lot of effort into my social network in 2023, and I made significant progress, but I have come to realize that who I allow into my life is extremely important. Ideally, I should be finding other talented and interesting people who have access to the opportunities, but connecting with this type of person requires a more skillful approach and serendipitous environment than I had at my disposal in 2023. So in 2024, we will be remedying this. Otherwise, it's easy to end up with a social network full of people who are either not a good fit or an active drain on my life.

My main paradigm is still Cal Newport's Deep Life Stack 2.0. This is the stack where he separates "get on top of your life" from "find self-actualization," which I think is a useful distinction. It's hard to self-actualize unless you have a solid foundation, so I am going to focus on that foundation before I worry about self-actualization.

Following this for a few months has made me acutely aware of how I spend my time and how much effort I'm wasting on things that do not bring any value back into my life. Trying to keep up with the daily "three core habits" followed by time block planning has been absolutely vital in helping me plan my days more effectively. I have started to realize it's less about "time" and "energy," and more about taking the right action at the right time for the right outcome.

So what I've done here is organized my habit priorities as a pyramid of sorts, which each habit feeding into my main goals for the year. The habit pyramid has three tiers:

Tier 1 - Critical Maintenance
These are things that must happen or else I am going to find it difficult to function on a high level. They are: diet, exercise, reducing screen time. I try to do these things every single day.

Diet is something I have made significant progress on by simply meal prepping giant batches of food and then freezing it all so I can just pull whatever I want to eat out of the freezer. 90% of my diet has become oatmeal bars for breakfast, veggie and meat burrito for lunch, protein + veg + carb + varying diverse spice dish for dinner. All of this freezes well and I can make it interesting by changing the core components while not spending endless time trying to learn new dishes. I also limit caffeine and alcohol to special occasions.

For exercise, I have switched more to a cardio focus rather than a resistance training focus because cardio helps with depression more than anything else, and I am trying to lose weight. I will get more serious about the diversity of fitness once I have more time. My main goal here is to do enough to keep me sane while making other changes to my life.

Reducing screen time means trying to get off the "trash internet" as much as possible. I have made good progress here, but I am realizing I need to substantially change my lifestyle to do even better because I've come to realize I am getting most of my needs met through screens, hence why they have been hard to cut down on.

Tier 2 - Important but more difficult to control
These are things that are still important but often include factors beyond my direct control, so meeting these needs are more complicated. These habits are: socialization, sleep, and managing stress.

For socialization, this has turned into activities I schedule then try to invite people to. That's either done through a meetup group I run or by organizing stuff outside of class with my Russian class. I've realized it's a lot easier to make friends if I take the approach of "I'm doing this, who wants to come?" rather than waiting to get invited to anything. The reason I have made this second tier is that it's hard to improve my social life without moving any more, so I'm trying to curb the amount of driving I do in favor of forcing myself to actually get the condo ready to move.

For sleep, I have to maintain this delicate balance of trying to stay stimulated enough in the evenings that I don't fall asleep too early and ruin my sleep schedule, but not so stimulated that I can't fall asleep. I am a morning person, so 2200-600 is my best sleep time. Unfortunately, a lot of social life happens at night, so adaption is a useful skill. If I am out late, melatonin before bed helps me fall asleep without a longer "wind down" period. I try not to take too much melatonin too regularly though because I find regular melatonin use starts to make me wake up at 200 and be unable to fall asleep again.

For managing stress, I journal regularly to process my emotions and get them out of my head, and also zazen meditation helps a lot too. Both of these things also have the benefit of making me realize when I've trapped myself inside of some mental construction that just is not real and is making me miserable. I have recently realized a lot of the stuff I've been obsessing about only exists inside of my own head and that I am the source of most of my misery. I don't think I would have realized that without journaling or zazen because both of those activities make conscious the content of my thoughts, which is the first step in changing them.

Tier 3 - Self-Actualization/Deep Learning
These are actives that make my life enjoyable but require that I feel good in order to really do. Right now, these are learning Russian and writing. A significant chunk of my social life has become organized around learning Russian, so I'm going to continue. And writing is obviously there because I want to finish my novel.

Goals
These habits are all connected to three goals I want to reach this year, which are:

1. Relocate - I've decided either to move down to the university area of Denver or the arts district. I need more advanced cultural and intellectual experiences in my life, and both of those locations support that. I'm going to just rent, so if it turns out I don't like the area, I'll just move.

The bigger hurtle here is managing my damned condo and getting it ready to rent out. I'm going to rent it and hire a property manager because if I decide I hate that, I'll just sell it later. But I have to get rid of all my shit, fix some maintenance issues, repaint the damned thing, etc.

Minimalism has been extremely useful here, and I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff with a few more things to do. Once I finish, I will have significantly downsized, which will make my life a lot easier.

2. Build a better social network - I grew up lower-middle class, so hanging out with people who come from the upper classes made me realize that the upper class life includes a hell of a lot more active networking and active social cultivation than the lower class experience. The lower class and/or dysfunctional family experience involves hanging out with family and friends of family that you mostly hate and have major issues and finding a way to guard yourself from everyone else's problems leaking into your life. The upper class social strategy is to find other talented people to do stuff with. Applying the lower class strategy to the upper class environment is doomed to failure because you are focused on guarding against losses instead of finding gains.

I don't really care about money or status, what I do want is genuine connection with talented people, which I have discovered involves projecting that myself then actively finding people who meet those criteria. Empathy and compassion are magical lifehacks here because they allow me to bridge the gap with almost anyone.

So my strategy here is to revamp the image I'm portraying (hence the focus on fashion), put myself in a good environment full of people I want to meet, pour energy and show active interest in others, then stop feeding into connections that aren't reciprocal or aren't getting me anywhere, and that's how it's done.

3. Writing - I need a creative outlet to feel fulfilled, and for me, that's writing. As I have written a lot of fiction over the past year, I've come to realize that there's a skill/craft element of fiction that I need to be constantly honing if I want to Git Gud. So this goal is to start taking the craft more seriously instead of just viewing it as a hobby.

What about work?
I don't really love software, but my current job is easy and pays well. I'm going to keep going on that ride until either one of those factors change. My job is not a hindrance toward my other goals, and it pays so well that I can subsidize easily the rest of my life. However, I am aware that this may not be forever, so I am not going to get complacent.

What I am going to do is try to be engaged with my piece of work without getting too sucked into corporate drama, and I'm also going to give up trying to find another job. My NW just hit $800k, and given I don't love software, I don't really see any point in prioritizing this right now when I'm already strapped for time and have more important things to do.

One thing I am going to do in 2024 is start tracking my expenses again. I gave up doing that in 2023 because I had other stuff to worry about, but I see myself fully quitting in the next two or so years, so I need to start prepping the financial runway in order to make that happen. My focus is less on cutting spending and more about making sure where I do put money is both skillful and useful.

[grundomatic]

If you need more on your reading list, Keith Ferrazzi's Never Eat Alone is a good one on professional/personal networking (pretty sure it's one and the same for him). The dust jacket is even orange.

I'm pretty sure family dysfunction spans all the classes. A quasi-cult setting certainly doesn't help. Groups like that seem to want to push members to the helpless/naive quadrant of Cipolla's model. Sometimes it's for the benefit of bandit leaders, but other times, it seems to just be the culture. Gotta help others from the group, no matter what. The stupid people then proceed to destroy value for everyone. Anyhow, I think the approach you've described for cultivating better connections is a good one.

[Jin+Guice]

Yes! The year of action!

I think this is a great plan. I continue to urge you to move.

Your plan is overly planned for my taste, but I know you are an intj while I am an xntp, so this is probably good.

Also, woah, you are rich! You can do anything you want where money is the obstacle!

[AnalyticalEngine]

January Update

I have already gotten extremely busy, probably more busy than is sustainable, and so I have not had much time to post here. Here's a brief update.

1. Money - I started tracking my expenses again, and I am definitely overspending. Not really the end of the world since money isn't a limiting factor in my life, but if I do want to quit work, I need to get this down to more reasonable levels. I am spending at about the medium income, which isn't a problem in a vacuum, but the real issue is that I know I can be more strategic about this. So that will be a focus over the next few months.

2. Work - The reason I care about this is that work has gotten busy again, which I immediately feel in my schedule. Before, when work got busy, I didn't have anything else useful to do and so did not care. Now when it gets busy, it starts eating into my exercise time, my writing time, my drawing time...even though I make a lot of money, I am getting sick of spending my limited time and energy here, so I am looking into how to make the FI thing more of a reality by coming up with actionable portfolio draw downs, realistic estimates of what I need, etc.

3. Hobbies - This is my biggest focus right now. I signed up for art lessons at a professional studio--something I have wanted to do since high school--and have also started attending the indie game developer meetups. Between my Russian class, my Russian conversation group, my writing group, my DnD group, my studio lessons, writing my novel, AND NOW the indie game dev group, I have way too much on my plate. I was actually making this all work decently well, so having to do a ton of stuff at work is throwing a major wrench in my life.

4. Diet and exercise - Exercise is jogging a 5K 3x/week, diet amounts to batch cooking about 12 veggie/meat/bean burritos and freezing them. Also experimented and made butter chicken, pirozhki, and biscotti this month. I want to be getting more exercise than I am, including more outdoor stuff like hiking/skiing, but I don't know how realistic this is in my life right now.

5. Moving - Continued to tour apartments and throw away junk. Rome was not built in a day...

6. Mental health - Doing better, I think partially because the days are getting longer, but also read two books that were life changing. The first is Radical Acceptance and the second is The Queer Art of Failure.

[Jin+Guice]

Why are you having trouble reducing spending?

Which Radical Acceptance did you read?

Glad to hear you are doing so many interests (I think a lot of people overload in the beginning, I certainly did)!

Glad to hear you are progressing towards moving!

[AnalyticalEngine]

Why are you having trouble reducing spending?

Plain old inertia, the fact my environment/social circle is fairly spendy, and also the fact I was "too frugal" before insofar as I was denying myself important opportunities because they were "too expensive." My goal now, given I'm hardly lacking for money but still need to be strategic to quit work, is to spend on things that have a return on investment while cutting out junk spending. This largely looks like spending more on classes (which I have done) and services to make things like moving easier/faster so I can get into the position I want to be in faster, while also be smarter about cutting spending on stuff that's just not adding any value (junk food, stuff that I end up having to throw out, etc).

Which Radical Acceptance did you read?

The one by Tara Brach. I think everyone gets different takeaways from books like that, but for me, the main insight has been the sheer extent I self-gaslight myself out of any emotion, which is a big reason for the depression and also how stuck I've been for years. Actually having emotions was something I was disallowed as a child inside of Mormonism, so getting back in touch with this has been life-changing.

What I mean by self-gaslighting is, let's take work for example. I might be stressed out at work, which manifests as a variety of primary emotions: anxiety, fear, anger, despair, etc. Before, when I felt emotions come up, my childhood programming would kick in, which is to shut them all up so I can keep doing "what I'm supposed to." This would often manifest as this internal monologue with themes such as: "I should be thankful I have this job," "everyone has to work," "something is wrong with me that I can't seem to make this work like everyone else can," etc.

Radical Acceptance is about being fully present and non-judgemental with how you feel, even the unpleasant emotions or the emotions that would be hard to act on. After doing this a bunch, I became much more aware of how I felt, what I can actually do about it, and what narrative I was telling myself. So something like "something is wrong with me because I can't live like everyone else" later turned into "this sucks actually and I should get out of here," largely because I learned to accept how I felt, even if that emotion went against social programming or was a "bad" emotion like anger.

Glad to hear you are doing so many interests (I think a lot of people overload in the beginning, I certainly did)!

The overload seems to almost be a necessary step in getting to the psychological position of being ready to dump work because I am now very aware of all the stuff I could be doing instead. Certainly, reaching a point where every work meeting is an exercise in wanting it to fucking end so that I can draw or write or practice Russian or ski is a whole lot better for freedom-to than just being vaguely, diffusely miserable the whole time and reading reddit.

[AnalyticalEngine]

March Update

After being pulled in a bunch of different directions in Feb, I am dedicating March to getting my stuff packed and moving. I wanted to reach the point of diminishing returns in my current lifestyle so that I would know what I'm looking for when I move, and I think I have a clearer picture at this point.

Really, it's all a numbers game. I want to be around more like-minded people with a greater access to an art and writing cultural scene. Also, being a sexual minority, I am largely demographically fucked unless I live in a big city. This point, really, I cannot stress it enough.

My plan right now is to move to Boulder, CO for at least a year and see how I like it. Boulder has convenient access to the mountains, lots of culture, is fairly walkable, close to FIRE people in Longmont without being Longmont (Longmont is demographically too limited for me), and is LGBT friendly. The two main downsides of Boulder is that it's expensive and still a smaller city. Mind you, it's not tiny or anything, but it's no Denver/NYC/San Francisco. But I figure, worse case scenario, I just move somewhere else when the lease is over. I have more to lose by not moving at this point.

I don't regret staying here and trying to make friends where I'm at now. I certainly made some acquaintancey friends in my writing group and my Russian group, and running both of those gave me some valuable experience in how to start up future groups. It's just that making like actual friends as opposed to hobby friends requires you live fairly close to each other, and this is the lesson I learned. Making friends when you have to drive at least 30 min to anything decent is an uphill battle because you're not getting those frequent, unstructured interactions that help build familiarity.

Web of Goals
Doing all this stuff also taught me the value in the web of goals approach, largely because limited time has made me aware of all the bullshit I let leak into my schedule or inefficient things I'm doing. Driving to the gym to work out, for example, and paying for the expensive gym pass, then driving to all my hobbies is an obvious inefficiency when I could be walking for the exercise instead. Of course, walking requires I am within 1-2 miles of my activities, not 15. So I have a clearer idea now of this aspect of lifestyle design, and I don't think I would have gotten here were it not for "inefficiently" trying to do everything at once.

Incidentally, I decided to discontinue the art class I signed up for, largely because I wasn't finding it a great use of my time. The expert feedback is useful, but I'm only getting like 5 minutes of that a class, and art is really just a lot of practice. I might take another class later, but I am shelving this for a time until I get other activities in order.

That said, I do think building a network of people in the hobby is useful for anything, and I have gotten a lot of mileage out of the Russian and writing groups for this reason. So when I pick up art again, I might just start an urban sketching group on meetup instead.

Depression
Depression kicked my ass again last month, although I am starting to feel better now that the sun and warm weather is coming back. Next winter, I am going to invest in some sort of SAD lamp.

I've written about this before, but the challenge with depression is feeling your emotions without letting excessive negativity carry you away into full on depressive episodes. My strategy in handling this is currently a mix of journaling and zazen meditation. The real benefit of both of these is that they make you very aware of your internal state so that you can watch the depression crop up and then watch your thoughts construct some narrative around the depression then stop yourself from letting that narrative carry you away. Using this, I can still feel all my emotions, be aware of my internal state, but try not to let the depression carry me into rumination that will waste weeks of my time being too depressed to function. It's still frustrating because I can never really act on my emotions immediately--I have to spend a few days deciding if they stem from legitimate problems or psychological issues--but I am still nonetheless making significant progress using this. For the first time in a long time, I am starting to feel hopeful about the future and starting to feel actually joy when I do things sometimes, so I think I'm on the right track.

Unfortunately, I have fallen behind on diet/exercise due to being too over-committed. I'm going to do my best to reel in what I can but save any major overhauls for after the move. The same goes with spending too. I've been tracking it, I'm eager to cut back waste again, but getting hardcore into it has to wait until after the move. Still, I think if I am diligent, I can move out in the next 1-3 months, so I'm finally ready to put all my energy into making that happen.

[theanimal]

Great news on the move! I’m looking forward to seeing how the changes work out for you. I think there are lots of positives ahead. At the very least, if you maintain your current schedule, there shouldn’t be as much driving around to various social meetups. Your social/social opportunity density is going to skyrocket.

[delay]

Thanks for your journal update! Humans live on waves, and one wave is high in summer and low in winter. Rather than install a lot of lamps why not figure out a way to enjoy the winter? Easy for me to say, since I love reading books.

[Jin+Guice]

Yes! Move! Move! Move! I believe that moving is a necessary, though not sufficient step towards your happiness, fulfillment and will strengthen your web of goals by strengthen potential for connections between nodes.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Thanks everyone! I think the moral of the story, at least for me, is that it was easy to get caught up in trying to optimize tiny, largely fruitless, things about my current life instead of making the bigger, more structural, and more difficult changes required to really be where I want to be. Location over-determines the rest of my life is what I've learned. So I will report back with how Boulder is once I'm there!

[sodatrain]

Awesome stuff - I believe this is my first comment in your journal! Been getting to know you a little in the MMG.

* Interesting class interactions observations! I've been thinking a lot about class, loosely, as a foreigner/guest in Guatemala! There are so many layers.
* Love your plan to move. I'm all about it with J+G!
* Life Stack 2.0. How is that going? Where are you in the stack? Did you try 1.0 first? What tools/systems did you pick to jump into it? (As you know, I'm going thru the video currently, contemplating the system. And "discipline" is an... uncomfortable (?), unattractive (?), undesirable (?) word yet it's the first step/level.

[AnalyticalEngine]

* Life Stack 2.0. How is that going? Where are you in the stack? Did you try 1.0 first? What tools/systems did you pick to jump into it? (As you know, I'm going thru the video currently, contemplating the system. And "discipline" is an... uncomfortable (?), unattractive (?), undesirable (?) word yet it's the first step/level.

Hey @sodatrain! I did try 1.0 first, then tried 2.0 for awhile. However, I've started to feel a bit like I'm just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic with the system, so I've fallen away from using it for now. I think it still has utility, but as I mentioned in the MMG, Cal really targets salarymen trying to escape from digital distraction hell, and I've started to feel like dealing with my Titanic (as opposed to the deck chairs) requires a less analytical approach.

All that said, I think it's still worth trying at least. The worst that can happen is you discover the framework is not for you. But like most frameworks, I think it reveals more about the world around it than it does itself. Ie, the sheer force of distraction-bullshit job-unhealthy habits pressure that is the modern world.

I do still use a modified version of the framework in daily habit tracking and daily todo lists + weekly/monthly planning, but it's not really separated into as clear of categories as Cal has.

However, one lesson I did learn from it is that it's hard to be in control over the big things in your life if the small ones are going to shit. That is, sometimes you have to built up enough agency from stacking deck chairs to do something about the massive hole in your hull.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Monthly update
A bit early this month, but I just calculated my net worth (which I do quarterly), so I figured I might as well update here while I'm at it. My net worth is now $878k, an increase of about ~$70k from last quarter. After years of saving, I think I've finally hit that snowball point where investment gains are starting to outpace my contributions. It's a pretty great feeling!

Health
Started to going to the gym 4x/week again after falling off the wagon, cut alcohol and sugar out of my diet, and switched to eating the "diabetes plate" aka each meal is 1/2 veggies, 1/4 carbs, 1/4 protein. I did this for mental health reasons, although I mostly feel much better physically and not mentally.

Mentally, after doing more zazen and journaling, I've realized that I've turned depression into an identity, and this is currently making me more miserable than the actual mental condition itself. I've had depression pretty consistently since my early 20s (which is when the condition usually manifests), and because of that, I've lost track of where the depression ends and where my identity begins. So, I've been trying to disidentify as a "depressive," and instead, simply be present with feelings of depression when they arise without ascribing a narrative or identity to them. This is a HELL of a lot easier said than done, as humans are meaning-making creatures and we tend to identify with our thoughts, emotions, and experiences, but having done a lot of Plotkin and Zen exercise, creating space between my life narrative and identity and how I feel mentally is getting easier.

I'm currently reading "Nature and the Human Soul," and in that book, Plotkin talks about missed developmental milestones of younger ages. The one I'm trying to work on now is mindfulness/presence, which he ascribes as a milestone to the first stage of life. I tend to live inside my head a lot and overthink everything into oblivion, so this has been helpful.

I'll write more about Plotkin's exercises when I get further into them.

Moving
I'm realizing I have to dump everything from my schedule except self-care and moving tasks, which I've been making progress on. Instead of moving to Boulder, what I have decided I'm going to do is rent some three month rentals in different cities and travel for awhile before settling down. I think it would benefit me to see more of the country again instead of just staying in Colorado. If I decide I love Colorado the most, I'll just come back.

This means downsizing everything I own into the size of a car basically, which is an absolutely enormous task. So much work, and I don't even own that much! I have a new appreciation for minimalism as I'm realizing 95% of what I own is not really required. Like, my book collection can be sold and replaced with kindle books, I don't really need 90% of my kitchen gadgets, etc. I'm pretty much just giving most of this away as I've come to see my time as more valuable than money here.

And if anyone has suggestions for where I should try first, I'd love to hear it! Currently, the list includes Washington DC, NYC, and San Fransisco.

[delay]

And if anyone has suggestions for where I should try first, I'd love to hear it! Currently, the list includes Washington DC, NYC, and San Fransisco.

Thanks for your journal update! When I'm undecided I sometimes roll a dice. This leads me do to things I wouldn't otherwise have done. It turns out that human capacity to predict the future is overrated, and sometimes dice really do better.

[jacob]

And if anyone has suggestions for where I should try first, I'd love to hear it! Currently, the list includes Washington DC, NYC, and San Fransisco.

All big cities and the most expensive ones in the country as well? Any particular reason? My travel advice, which usually doesn't go over well, is to see a variety of places rather than variations of one kind of place. Unless you've already locked on to big city living and are just looking to fine tune the options, I'd suggest trying different sizes and as well as different distances from downtown. I'd suggest trying different sized homes from a studio to a bungalow to a McMansion, even something alternative like a tiny house or a houseboat. And so on ... Different neighborhoods within the same city will likely have very different vibes. (My favorite planning tool for that one is https://judgmentalmaps.com/ ) but you generally find the same collection of vibes in similar-sized cities.

Add: Travel style depends on which perceiving function you're trying to satisfy: Ni, Ne, Si, Se.

[AxelHeyst]

For variety I’d also consider smaller cities that punch above their weight in terms of cultural / social diversity (which I think is a criteria for you). Santa Cruz comes to mind.

Are non US locations eligible? Lisbon, Barcelona, and Porto come to mind if so. Might be fun to throw them in the rotation just for the fun of it even if you have no desire to expat full or even part time. If I wanted to live in a city I’d put serious thought into a nonUS option for at least part of every year. (I may be biased at the moment having just spent 9 hours in Bakersfield…

ETA: in terms of which city first, I second the dice idea if you find the decision occupying much more bandwidth than you normally devote to deciding what to cook for dinner.

[Jin+Guice]

Are you switching up your plan to delay it again or is it genuinely what you want to do? How much longer will it take you to move to another city vs. Boulder? Could you just rent for 3 months in Boulder?


I have a lot of opinions on cities. I've been to almost every major U.S. city.

My fav is obviously New Orleans. New Orleans is, imo, the smallest major U.S. city (I don't like this, but a lot of people do). The biggest selling point for me is that you can truly do whatever you want and no one fucking cares. It's considered rude to ask someone about what they do for money. People very much consider themselves more than their jobs. If you talk about your job it had better be very interesting. There is a vibrant niche community for every artistic endeavor. If you crave unabated mainstream success, New Orleans is a bit provincial, but it uses that provinciality to build it's own mini-scene that occasionally produces a break out mid-level national success. Compared to most U.S. cities, it is very cheap to live here. Compared to everywhere in the U.S. I have been, it is the easiest place to meet people. There is a very vibrant and active queer community.

The downsides are that nothing the city does works very well. Public services are terrible. It is one of the highest crime cities in the U.S. Police take hours to show up, if they show up at all. The politicians are all corrupt. The streets are mostly terrible (upcoming superbowl next year though... this usually means a lot of streets get fixed). Sometimes there is random flooding because the drainage system is old and hard to fix. New Orleans major industry is selling New Orleans= Adult Disney World to tourists, so on a surface, I got Bourbon faced on Shit Streeet level, it is cheesy af (easy to avoid this at almost all times though). It's difficult to find white collar jobs here. None of this matters that much to me, but some or all of it drives a lot of people insane.

It's a great place to try out not paying for all of your solutions, because if you convince people with money, they won't always do what they say they are going to do. However, you can basically do anything you want because no one is watching.


Other notable cities (in order):
Chicago (this is my next favorite bc I love NYC)
Detroit (I think of this as New Orleans 2; Might be above Chicago depending on my mood)
Pittsburgh
Atlanta
Portland, OR
San Diego
Philadelphia (grew up in a suburb so had to get away, but is actually pretty cool)

Baltimore is supposed to be great in the way New Orleans is, but I haven't spent any time there as an adult.

I love Texas. Houston is kind of cool despite trying really hard to be awful and Austin is ok despite trying really hard to be cool.

Richmond, Louisville and Portland, ME are my favorite not quite major cities.



I also really like NYC and SF (recommend Oakland over SF). I lived in NYC and visit frequently. It is really great, but very expensive.

I don't like Washington D.C.


I also want to caveat that I am from the East Coast, so I'm likely undervaluing living near mountains since I'm used to not living near them.



As @jacob mentioned, major cities in the U.S. are often a variation on the same theme. They've got restaurants and coffee shops everywhere. Don't get me wrong, I love discussing the details that are different about various cities, various restaurants and various coffee shops, but overall I agree that there is more variation within a city than between cities.

I think the major differences in the U.S. are: Major city, mid-sized city, small city, small town but downtown (barely any left), suburb and rural.

Imo, the difference between living in a car driven, good schools, family suburb and a city are gigantic.

[theanimal]

Ah! You were so close! I think you should go forward with your move. I'm worried that your new plan is a step back and that you are procrastinating actually moving and seeking comfort in further analysis. What is visiting some more cities going to do to change your mind? You already know that you need to move, it seems like the imperative would be to move first to somewhere that you know will work (Boulder) then find the most ideal spot later on. At this stage, you've gone around to other towns already and have been thinking on this for years. I get the seduction of analysis, though I think it's time for some action. Why not do what you wrote below then go around and visit some cities from there?

That's the conclusion I'm coming too as well. I've just been driving around and trying new things for a year and a half now--which has been a critical step in overcoming some internal limitations--but I think I've reached the limits of my outer lifestyle at this point. I feel like holding out for the "perfect" location is holding me back, and I'd probably be better off to get a six month lease on an apartment in Denver/Boulder/Longmont and just see how it goes. If it turns out I don't like the location, a six month lease isn't that much of a problem. But if I love it, then I can sell my condo and buy a new one or make some more permanent move.

[guitarplayer]

I’d say swap car for bicycle, then it will become much clearer what slow travelling itinerary to take. Downsizing so that this is possible would be a journey in and of itself