I just watched the movie Before Sunrise, and I feel like I have thoughts for days. I don’t do much writing nowadays, so my vocabulary to express my thoughts is quite limited. The movie does a great job at capturing how the magic of how intoxicating love is, and how the most cinematic moments of your life can happen quite randomly. Some things happen, and we don’t know why they happened, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture how we felt at that very moment. I feel that way about SF. Not that I am trying to recapture the magical moments of my life, but the fact that nothing magical has happened while I am here. There is something so euphoric about love that supersedes everything else you could possibly experience, drugs aside.
Something that struck me while I was watching Before Sunrise is that everything that happened on their first date was only possible because they had money. The experiences they were afforded was a lot more expensive than the movie made it look. I have money now. I am able to afford many experiences now. I have people with whom also have money. What I lack is people in my life are specific people with whom to share experiences in a meaningful way. With the right people, walking in the park could be euphoric. With other people, even the more glamorous experiences could be mundane.
I’ve started to believe in soulmates again. Or, at least, I think everyone has a finite number of soulmates in their life. There a few people you can share a meaningful connection with. There are also a few people you could form a future together with. What is hard is meeting people at the right time in the right circumstances. When a connection exists, it exists. I think I’ve gotten very good at seizing the opportunity in the past couple of years, so I’ve seized all the opportunities that have been presented to me. The unfortunate part is that opportunities for meaningful connection are few and far between. If you put yourself out there on a reasonably regular basis, I would venture to say that true connection comes once every two to four years. Not all potential connections turn into actual connections.
The places in the movie seem so different when you are with someone you feel a connection with and when you don’t. I want to travel again. I want to get out of SF. It’s not that I feel suffocated here, but I just like the feeling of unfamiliarity. I don’t see this place as a magical, and I want to find a new place that is unfamiliar so I can feel the unfamiliarity again by myself. I didn’t pick a job that was digital nomad-friendly, which limits my ability to travel while still working, but I realized I don’t like the feeling of being comfortable with my surroundings. The feeling of alienation has circled me my entire life, and I like for my external and internal environments to match up. The reason I like the time I was in Costa Rica so much was because it was so unfamiliar. I didn’t know how to speak Spanish well, and I was immersed in a tropical environment quite different from the northeast climate I grew up in.
I might have an opportunity to move to Eastern Europe in the next couple of years, but I’m not sure if I am going to take it. I’m not sure how much I actually care about moving to environments I find unfamiliar. Is it something I care about only in passing, or am I willing to make sacrifices to make sure I continue to experience unfamiliarity?
shades of gwei 