Does where you live matter?

However, I have also learned that as much as where you live, your relationship and attitude to it shapes your experience there. You have to really be there. The richness and meaning arises in part from choosing it at the expense of all other places you could be and things you could be doing. Accepting a place’s shortcomings, the things it lacks, and its imperfections is essential to appreciating everything it does have to offer.

What I’ve learned in my mid-thirties is that tangling with the friction is where the sense of belonging I’ve so long been looking for actually begins. So perhaps what Anna and Tom need is not kids, but more specifically obligations and responsibilities to something other than themselves. They are missing the friction that comes from being known and needed by a wide range of people — not just high agency creatives in the prime of their youth — because they want to preserve a life they can leave at any moment.

I think often about the fact that, had I not had the immense and evolutionarily bizarre privilege of doing whatever I wanted for a solid decade of my adult life, I may never have reached these kinds of conclusions.

And so the problem that I share with Anna and Tom is that, by quirk of history, technology, and privilege, the three of us simply know too much about the world. As humans, we were never supposed to live with this much optionality embedded into our psyche. People didn’t used to see the myriad obligations of their lives as opportunity costs, but rather as the unavoidable work of being alive.

Though it’s now possible to eliminate a large chunk of friction and obligations from our lives, that doesn’t mean that doing so will help us thrive. As we move into this bizarre era of AI-assisted living, I’d argue that the quality and meaning of people’s lives will increasingly be determined by whether or not they realize that fact. Whether or not they recognize that while drudgery, routine, and obligation are now optional — they are also a big part of what makes life meaningful.

Not making a choice is a choice. And it’s one that excludes the sense of belonging you cultivate when you engage with life in its fullest, most imperfect sense.