Would we desire a different life if we lived somewhere else?

I’ve often wondered what would have happened if. 

If I hadn’t moved to Vienna. If I’d stayed in the town where I grew up in Italy. Or if somewhere I was meant to stay only for a while had eventually become home. 

We spend a lot of time collecting alternative versions of ourselves. 

Listening to Laura Karasinski on the curious brought this topic back into my life. Two questions in particular stayed with me:

where do you belong, and how do you want to show up in a place? 

Laura spoke about growing up between Austria and Poland. “I always craved belonging,” she said. She wanted an identity that could hold both cultures, without having to choose between them. 

This got me thinking again about how much of who we are is connected to where we live. When we’re trying to work out our identity, how much room do we leave for the different places that shape us? And the ultimate question, how can we figure out where we really belong? 

I’ve sometimes been so busy looking for a single identity, preferably one everyone else would approve of, that I ended up wondering whether I had one at all. It's a question I am still working on figuring out and it has led me to start wondering how much those expectations have to do with where I live. Would I feel the same pressure to be a certain person somewhere else? 

Paul Graham wrote an essay on 'Cities and Ambition'. In the spirit of honest conversation, let me tell you that I stumbled across it through a reel a friend sent me, but what matters is I did read the article. Graham suggests that cities send messages about what matters, influencing who we want to become. When the people around us share certain ambitions, those ambitions become difficult to ignore. They might never become ours. But they can still become the measure we compare ourselves against. In his account, New York places particular value on money, Cambridge encourages you to be smarter, and so on.  

So, what does Vienna value? Bouldering, for sure. And silence. 

Laura also spoke about paying attention to our surroundings, which made me think about how often we absorb these ideas about who we should be or what deserves our time without even noticing.  

An exhibition opening keeps appearing in your feed, and friends mention they’re going. Suddenly, missing it feels like missing something important, although a week ago you didn’t know it existed. 

Other messages are built into the place itself. Knowing the metro runs all night might make you more likely to say yes to another drink or see where the evening goes. And in a city where people gather in squares, you can step outside without plans and end up spending hours with someone you bumped into. Over time, meeting people might feel like less of an effort, and starting a conversation with someone you don’t know might feel more natural. We absorb some of this without thinking. Noticing it might give us a little more choice about what we do with it. 

Beyond that, I think it’s an interesting question to ask ourselves if the place we live does actually encourage the person we want to become, and how closely do its priorities resemble our own. So less of “do I belong to this place?” and more of “does this place belong to me?”. As four and a half years after moving to Vienna, I’m still curious about what it means to belong to this city. 

Behind the whole question sits a considerable amount of privilege. Being able to choose where to live according to the life we hope to build is already an enormous freedom. Plus, luck and timing play a big part in this, as we’re getting older while all this happens, and our aspirations might have changed. Would staying in Barcelona have given me the life I pictured, or a completely different one? Or would I eventually have found myself there, dreaming about Vienna? 

Thinking about this brought Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to mind. Marco Polo describes Isidora, the city he has always dreamt of. But by the time he reaches it, he is old. His dreams placed him there in his youth. Now he sits with the old men, watching the young go by. “Desires are already memories.” 

Belonging doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, and I wonder how much of it we need to feel at home. Perhaps we can enjoy the life we’re building somewhere without being entirely sure it’s “our place”. That’s still an open question for me, which is why I keep coming back to Laura’s second one. 

How do I want to show up in the place where I am? 

After days spent staring at a blank notebook page and an equally blank laptop screen (apparently, one untouched surface wasn’t intimidating enough), sharing this piece is my own small way of joining the conversation happening here. Perhaps we don’t need to have it all figured out before we start showing up where we are. 

- Ludovica