On "Cities and Ambition"
Ok, those of you who know me, know that I've been trying out different cities for the last 3 years now. Most people looked at that with a mixture of awe ("New York? Wow, exciting!!"), puzzlement ("What's wrong with Toronto?"), fear ("Berlin? new culture, languge, social circle, ieee"). What was more compelling to me, than any of those emotions, was the prospect of not having seen the world or strived to free myself, developing my creative, intellectual and other human facilities. That to me would be horrendous. But only a few people I knew seemed to even understand those motivations, much less consider the pros and cons of acting on them.
So I nearly fell out of my seat, refreshed at reading Paul Graham's new essay "Cities and Ambition". "Finally someone understands!!!!" It confounded me for the longest time, how people I knew couldn't see any of this. When I decided to leave Toronto, I made a firm decision that I wanted to spend my life doing interesting work. But first, I needed to find an interesting place to "be" and I needed to own my own time. So places like Berlin and London had a level of civility, dynamism, discourse, etc that made me "feel" like I can "be" myself - intelligent, expressive, etc. I'm currently working on the "time" bit.
When I was deciding what to do, I knew I needed to do it while I was still young with a lot of energy. But I wasn't sure of the order all of this should take. As moving cities is very uprooting, I decided to tackle that first. Here's the steps I have mapped out. This may or may not be the best path as I didn't know how to start at the beginning:
- [done] choose city to live
- [in progress] own my own time [one] [two] [three]
- [lifelong pursuit] interesting work / social network
Thank-you thank-you thank-you Paul.
Posted by Timothy Washington on 2008.05.31| Original post
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