Stop Moving. Or Don't. But Pick One.

Not permanently, nothing in this life is permanent, that is partly the point, but in any given year, in any given moment of standing in a city with an open calendar and a decision to make, you are broadly one or the other.

The mover. The stayer.

I have been both. I have opinions about both. Here they are.

The first twenty-four hours in a new place are extraordinary.

Everything is interesting. The street outside the guesthouse window is interesting. The menu you can't fully read is interesting. The way the city sounds at 7am, different from the last city, different from the one before, is interesting. You are all attention, all noticing, fully present in the way that only unfamiliarity produces.

This is real. This is not nothing. The accumulation of new places over years builds something, a specific literacy, a comfort with disorientation, the ability to find the good café and the working SIM card and the trustworthy landlord in any city within seventy-two hours. These are skills. They are earned.

The mover also gets the stories. The border at 4am. The city discovered by accident. The week that became a month that became six months in a place you'd never heard of before you arrived. The stories compound. The passport fills. The map on the wall, the one with the pins, the one every mover has in some form, gets denser.

Not immediately. Not obviously. It arrives slowly, the recognition, usually around year two, usually triggered by something specific, a birthday, a Sunday afternoon, a conversation that goes somewhere real and then stops because one of you is leaving next week, that you have been to many places and are deeply known by almost no one.

The surface has been covered comprehensively. The depth has been deferred. Indefinitely, in some cases. The mover who never stops moving is trading depth for breadth in a deal that feels even for years and then suddenly doesn't.

The coffee shop knows your order.

This sounds small. It is not small. The coffee shop knowing your order means you have been there enough times for a human being to have noticed you as a specific person with specific preferences rather than a generic customer with a generic request. It means you are, in some small way, known.

The stayer accumulates this. The landlord's number in the phone, saved under a name rather than a number. The doctor you've been to twice, not an emergency, the regular kind, the kind that requires explaining your situation and having it understood. The neighbourhood that nods. The street vendor who starts preparing your usual when they see you coming. The friend you didn't meet at a networking event but at the place you both went every Tuesday until one Tuesday you talked.

These things take time. More time than a month. More time than three months. The staying has to be long enough for the place to stop treating you as a visitor and start treating you as a feature of the landscape.

When it happens it feels like something the moving never quite delivered. Not excitement, the moving has more excitement. Something quieter. The specific warmth of being somewhere that has made room for you.

What the stayer doesn't get is the first twenty-four hours.

The new city. The unread menu. The 7am sounds of somewhere you've never been. The specific high of arrival, that particular combination of anxiety and possibility that the stayer traded for the coffee shop that knows their order.

Some days the stayer misses it. Gets the itch. Starts looking at flights.

This is where the person in the reddit post I read this morning is standing.

They wrote: I can rationalise whatever choice I make. They all seem like great options. Which is part of the problem.

This is the most honest sentence I've read this week.

The paradox of this life, the specific cruelty of having built enough freedom that all the options are viable, is that good options don't eliminate the cost of choosing. They just make the cost invisible until you're already paying it.

Choose to move: you get the new city, the Africa adventure, the stamps, the stories. You defer the depth again. You push the coffee-shop-that-knows-your-order further down the road.

Choose to stay — LATAM, the place you already love, the connections you've already started: you get the depth. You give up the adventure. You sit with the itch for a while, the way you always do before a new place, the way you said yourself you always end up glad you did.

There is no wrong answer. This is not comfort, it is the source of the paralysis. Wrong answers are easy to eliminate. Good answers that cost different things require you to decide what you value and admit what you're willing to lose.

The movers who stay miserable are the ones who keep moving to avoid deciding. The movement is the decision, I don't have to choose a place because I'm always between places. It works until it doesn't.

The stayers who stay miserable are the ones who stopped moving because they were tired rather than because they chose to. The staying is the default rather than the decision. It works until the itch becomes unbearable.

The people I've seen do this well, in either direction, made an actual choice. Not a rationalisation. Not a default. A choice, with the cost acknowledged, the trade understood, the loss accepted.

Move because you want to move. Stay because you want to stay. Both are fine. Both cost something. Know what you're paying before you pay it.

You already know which one you are right now.

The non-refundable tickets are a clue.

Andrew - No Refunds •••