There’s More to Life than Cheap Beer and Fast Wifi (Why I Chose to Live in Lisbon)
For the last seven years, I’ve traveled around the Americas, Europe and Asia, spending no more than 3 months in a place at a time.
I had an amazing time living and working around the world. But last year, I felt my wanderlust waning for the first time.
I started to care less and less about discovering new places. Instead, all I wanted to do was focus on growing my self and my business. But I found it difficult to focus on my business while moving around so much.
So midway through 2016, I decided it was time for me to establish a home base.
I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Since 2015, many of my business-travel friends started to settle down in places like Budapest, Chiang Mai, Medellin, and Saigon.
I’ve lived several months each in each these places. But to me, each city felt like it was missing something crucial.
When I told my friends this, they couldn’t understand.
“What do you mean something’s missing? This place has everything! Low cost of rent, fast wifi, cheap beer, what else could you need?”
Don’t get me wrong- connectivity and affordability are indeed essential to to livability. But there’s more to life than cheap beer and fast wifi.
I wasn’t just looking for a place to live; I was looking for a place to thrive.
After much reflection, I settled on five factors that most contribute to my ability to thrive in a location:
- Wanderability
- Delightfulness
- Human Visibility
- Inclusivity
- Healthy Living
The Wanderability Factor
I built my business on thoughts I had while walking.
I came up with my language learning theory while walking around the streets of Rio. I also composed most of the lyrics from my 8 Language rap video while walking around the streets of Cali, Colombia.
Indeed, I think better when I’m walking.
Since the act of walking is a major driver for my business, wanderability is one of the main environmental factors I consider when choosing a city.
What’s the difference between “wanderability” and “walkability”?
Walkability refers to the logistics of getting from point A to B by foot. When we say a city is “walkable,” we’re saying that you don’t need a car, bike, bus or train to get to most places.
Wanderability, on the other hand, goes a step beyond the logistical “can you walk?” to the motivational “will you walk?”
If you live in a walkable city but you don’t know if it’s wanderable or not, here’s a good litmus test.
Imagine you’ve just left a restaurant, you’ve got time to kill, and you’re about to go home.
You plug your home address into Google maps and get the image below. What would your normal response be?
If your normal response is “Ooh this will be a pleasant stroll” then you are probably living in a wanderable city.
If your normal response is “F** dat I’m calling uber,” then you probably just live in a walkable city.
So what makes one city more wanderable than another?
It’s all comes down to your personal tastes for people and places.
When it comes to the places, I personally find colorful architecture, hilly terrain, large bodies of water, and abundant greenery the most interesting.
When it comes to the people, I just love to see humans in the streets having a good time.
Everyone has his or her own tastes.
To figure out your tastes, you need to figure out what delights you.
Indeed, Delightfulness is so important to me, I consider it a factor on its own.
The Delightfulness Factor
It’s 6am in the morning, I’m sleeping in my apartment in Rio de Janeiro, and my alarm goes off.
I HATE the feeling of getting out of bed underslept, so I’m still a bit surly as I leave the house.
Across the street, I see a man laying on his back underneath a taxi cab, apparently trying to fix something with his car.
When the man hears me close the front gate, he rolls out from underneath his car, sits up, and gives me a mile-wide smile:
“Good morning buddy! May you have a wonderful and blessed day!”
Instantly, my mood shifts. For the next 20 minutes, I’m grinning like an idiot. For the rest of the day, I feel delighted.
Delightfulness is no small matter
When something delights you, you’re mood elevates. When you’re in a better mood, you’re more creative, more attractive to others, and more productive.
Delightfulness is ultimately generated from within — but we are all products of our environment.
Certain external events will trigger the delightfulness reaction more than others.
Moreover, when you’re already in a delightful mood, you’re more likely to be delighted by things.
In other words, delightfulness has momentum.
A series of small delights spaced out over the course of a day can lead to extraordinary levels of productive optimism:
Again — this shouldn’t be under appreciated — consistent positivity correlates with positive health and financial outcomes.
Therefore, the simplest way to improve your quality of life is to just find a place that delights you and stay there.
The Human Visibility Factor
As I mentioned before, half of what delights me is the people I see.
When i leave the house and see people from all walks of life having a good time, I can’t help but feel good.
But if everyone is laughing and enjoying life behind closed doors, I won’t be able to laugh with them.
There are a few things that contribute to the visibility of humanity:
How much time do people spend outdoors?
I grew up in American suburbia, where the only time you saw people outside was when they were mowing their oversized lawns.
For the rest of the time, people stayed in the climate-controlled living rooms watching TV and playing X box.
Some cultures just prefer the outdoors more than others.
Weather is obviously a factor, but it can go both ways. Montreal was the coldest place I’ve experienced to date — apocalyptic snowstorms and -42 wind chill prohibits outdoor activities there for most of the year.
But in the summer, there is a world-class festival going on every day, and the parks are always full of people lounging and playing.
Public drinking and loitering laws play a major role as well.
In Rio, you can hang out and drink anywhere, which means that people hang out and drink everywhere.
On any given night, there are always way more people dancing under the roof of the night sky than under the roof of the nightclub.
With so many humans out and about, your chances of getting friended or delighted by strangers is high.
How often do people smile and acknowledge each other?
I lived several months in Beijing and Shanghai, and anyone who’s lived in these cities can attest that Chinese people are not the friendliest group of people on earth.
In a major chinese city, no one makes eye contact, no one makes small talk, and no one acknowledges anyone.
No matter who you are, this environment can pollute your mood just as much as the air can pollute your bloodstream.
After several months of living in China, I made a habit of going into battle-mode whenever I left the house.
Then one day, while mean-mugging my way down the street, I made eye contact with a middle aged Chinese lady, and she gave me a big warm smile.
I was so caught off guard, I almost lost balance and fell over.
This was the first time any person had smiled me in the months, and I had completely forgotten how good it felt to be smiled at.
In my body, I felt a tingling sensation — is that my heart again? Is this how the Grinch felt when he heard those people singing Christmas carols for the first time?
Just like the brazilian cab driver, that Chinese lady made my day.
Indeed, it’s the small things in life that seem to matter most.
How diverse is the outdoor population?
There’s something about seeing humanity in all its different shapes and colors that I find comforting.
For example, one of my favorite living experience was in an alleyway in Ho Chi Minh city.
Many Vietnamese families have all 3 living generations of the family in a single household.
So whenever I came home in the evening, I would see babies laughing, toddlers playing games, teenagers trying to impress their friends, college students trying to discover themselves, young adults hustling to make their path in life, older adults motorbiking their entire families to work and school, and old people just kickin’ it on doorsteps and watching the rest of us with amusement as we all try way too hard to impress each other.
Starting and ending my day amongst all the characters of humanity was very grounding to me, and I always look for this in neighborhoods I choose to live in.
Then beyond age and gender, there is also race and ethnicity. I always prefer a multi-cultural environment to a monocultural one.
I don’t get offended when people from homogenous societies in Europe or Asian marvel at my skin color and hair texture, but it does start to get to you after a while.
It’s just nice to be in a place where people’s default perception of you and others is “human” rather than “other”.
The Healthy Living Factor
The worst thing in life is being sick.
No matter how happy you are with your money and relationships, diarrhea will mess up your day.
No matter how stressed you are with work or your girlfriend, none of that matters to you when you’re sweating and shivering in bed with a fever.
No matter how delightful or diverse a place might be, none of that means anything to me if the physical environment is detrimental to my health.
I find that the only westerners who really appreciate the importance of clean water, air and food are the ones who’ve spent significant time in China.
Living in Beijing and breathing the air there is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
There were times when I’d wake up in the middle of the night hawking up black phlegm. Other times I would open a newspaper to find that my favorite street dumpling vendor was actually feeding me cardboard cooked in oil salvaged from restaurant sewers.
There are a lot of things I like about China, and I don’t regret my time there, but there is absolutely no way I will ever live there again.
At the foundation of emotional, mental and spiritual well-being, lies physical well-being.
In other words, nothing else matters until you are healthy.
Beyond these direct influencers, there’s also the question of how much the physical landscape and the people inhabiting it inspire you to live healthy.
Some cultures are super active. For example, my friends in Melbourne Australia were just as likely to invite me out for a game of basketball or trampoline park as they were to dinner.
In contrast, it seemed like all anyone ever wanted to do in Budapest was go out to restaurants and bars to pack their mouths full of cheap food and booze.
When choosing a place to live, the question I ask myself is “Will I naturally fall into a healthy lifestyle, or will staying healthy be a constant uphill battle.”
Conclusion
For the first time in several years, I’ve finally chosen a home base — Lisbon, Portugal.
The humanity and scenery inspire me to wander the city, stay healthy and be delighted. It’s not difficult to make friends with local Portuguese people, and Portuguese people have modest freedom to express their true selves.
I find myself in a positive mood almost every day, and this positivity translates directly into work and relationships.
But the point of this post is not to convince you that Lisbon is the best place in the world — because it’s not. It’s just a really good place for me, considering my tastes.
All I want people to do is to figure out what their tastes are, and choose their environment accordingly.
If you already know what factors and places inspire you, let me know in the comments.
