Yes, there is a part of me that wants to move abroad. It’s the part that believes Silicon Valley/New York/London is where the tech action is. Where I’d likely find people of like or at least similar aspirations. Take for instance the Philippine Tech Community. Its the same faces, and there is a reason for this, for keeping an 8 hour job and still coding/blogging/learning new programming languages/coding up personal projects is tiring and people who are either not rich/not very very smart/ very very productive/ very very lucky can do it. Life get’s in the way. I consider myself lucky , and this is the only reason why I am at least at the periphery or maybe the first row at the outside of the Philippine Tech Community, not quite there yet but slowly inching inwards. Sometimes it’s not about greener pastures. It’s what a musician and a dancer working in Hong Kong Disneyland says when interviewed by Kara Davin in last weeks episode of OFW Diaries, It’s the opportunity to practice something you love.
And I think that to a certain extent, people make these choices based on conceptions they have about themselves and the people they’d like to be. If you see yourself as someone who is interested in art, you may move to New York, not just because there is a lot of great art there, but also because you’ll meet people there who are themselves interested in art and who will nudge you toward more involvement with art and artists. Or you might move to Denver, because you want to be an outdoorsy person. People you meet there will typically be outdoorsy, and they’ll make it easier for you to become this outdoorsy person that you hope to be. At a more general level, people may simply feel that they’re “destined for bigger things”, or ready for a “simpler life”, and they may choose cities based on these feelings. Not just because they’re going where they want to go, but because they’re committing themselves to a certain lifestyle, and placing themselves in a situation where the people they come to know will act as constraints on them, pushing them to behave in a certain way. After all, you can love art in Denver and be outdoorsy in New York.
It seems to me that people want to be a lot of things that they can’t necessarily become on their own. A move can be a means to commit oneself to a certain course, and to make it harder to back away from a desired goal or style of life.
via The Bellows » Paper of the Day the First.