But I’ve always been intrigued by how cities function—and dysfunction as they experience pivotal moments.

It started in the early 2000s when I regularly participated in, was obsessed with, and wrote about Critical Mass, the celebration of bicycles that now happens in hundreds of cities around the world:

The monthly gathering of friends and strangers, the subsequent reclamation of the streets, and the temporary urbanism created is the antithesis of what the American city has become… Never on time, real people - whole families, teachers, activists of all shades, messengers, nine-to-five office workers, old folks, teenagers, you name it - flood the streets, producing an unfamiliar picture of the city… With bikes and pedestrians occupying car-free streets for blocks - hooting, hollering, and cheering - it is as if streets designed for the singular purpose of facilitating auto traffic have been renovated into the finest of European public squares.

I wrote that in 2005 with lots of dashes, em and otherwise!

More than 20 years later, I’m still intrigued by the dynamic of cities changing, whether for a few hours or—structurally and demographically speaking—forever.

Like San Francisco’s Mission District, which experienced one of its first waves of gentrification during my Critical Mass days, Valencia—and cities from Mexico City to Melbourne—are at critical inflection points.

Because I love riding my bicycle, it's often the lens I choose to illustrate the bigger picture.

Whereas some places battle over bike lanes and pathetically turn them into little more than another culture war, others have good—and complicated—problems to solve.

In Valencia, it’s extra complicated.

Longish story short—the previous socialist administration basically transformed the city’s bike infrastructure. It’s not the best, but it’s among the best you’ll find anywhere in the world. If you come from most parts of the United States, you’ll find cycling here to be pleasant. You might even chuckle when people say things like cycling in Valencia is dangerous. Here cars treat cyclists with care and respect 95% of the time, whereas you’re anywhere between a target and a nuisance in most American cities.

So it’s all about perspective. It’s also all relative—when compared to other places and locally.

Between 2015 and 2023, Valencia underwent an aggressive transformation under Councilor Giuseppe Grezzi, increasing its cycling network from 64 to nearly 190 kilometers and reallocating 150,000 square meters of asphalt for pedestrians. Following a 2023 shift to a conservative administration, this rapid expansion has slowed to a "tense coexistence," marked by the reopening of major thoroughfares like Carrer de Colón to private traffic and the stalling of new Low Emission Zones.

Take Carrer de Colón. Under the previous administration, the street was closed to private cars to prioritize buses, bikes, and pedestrians, drastically cutting noise and vehicle volume. In late 2023, the incoming conservative government reopened lanes to private traffic—resulting in a 33% to 70% surge in car volume. While the bike lane remains, the street feels noticeably more hostile than it did a few years ago. As we speak, the street is undergoing a largely cosmetic transformation, missing the opportunity to reverse what was clearly a mistake.

That said, Colòn and most of Valencia’s core feels more than suitable for alternative modes of transportation—from my perspective. There are too many cars and too much traffic in some areas—something that’s impossible to not notice after you visit Paris or even Barcelona. If the right loses the next election, hopefully Valencia will continue with the great work they were doing before they took power.

But that’s only half the story.

The very bike lanes that transformed Valencia have become victims of their own success.

You can’t leave the house without seeing everything from scooters to e-bikes to the occasional shopping cart in the bike lane.

And just as bad, you also can’t go outside without seeing large groups of tourists—most often the Dutch, Americans, Brits, and Italians (in order based on my unscientific observation)—riding rental bikes on the sidewalks, across plazas, and through city streets.

I’m as big of a bicycle proponent as you’ll find, but Valencia needs to take a page out of Barcelona’s book and crack down on things like this.

So, again, none of this means Valencia’s cycling infrastructure has failed. It means the city has reached a different stage of urban development.

Twenty years ago many cities were asking whether they should build bike lanes at all. Valencia now needs to ask how to manage the success of having so many people actually using them.

That’s actually a great problem to have, but only if you have people in power who see it as a problem and have the political will to do something about it. Like in Barcelona, where Airbnb will cease to exist by 2028 and private bike sharing platforms will be out by 2027 because they don’t serve people who live in Barcelona.

Governments need to recognize that infrastructure isn't something that gets built once and walked away from—even if it didn’t happen under your watch. Cities and the way people use the streets evolve. Policy has to evolve with them.

Success creates new problems. Good governments solve those too, but—I guess—they must acknowledge their predecessor’s success in the first place.

Eventually, the practical has to meet the theoretical.

What is a bicycle and what is a bicycle lane?

If you lose sight of the answer to those questions, you lose control of conditions. And when you lose control of conditions in an area that seems insignificant relative to the bigger picture, you not-so-slowly start to lose control of the bigger picture.

Take it from me—I come from a place that not-so-slowly lost control.

All of that said—

Even under a conservative government that has slowed progress—and opposed measures like Low Emission Zones—the baseline expectation here remains remarkably different from what I’m used to.

People still broadly expect government to maintain public space—to keep things clean and functioning and generally improve the city.

The conversation hasn’t yet completely descended into whether bike lanes themselves represent some kind of ideological threat. At least not to the extent that it has at the United States’ Department of Transportation. And even where it has, there are enough people who operate with sanity in Valencia and in and around Spain and Europe to fight the good fight.

That’s a distinction worth protecting.

In America, bike lanes became another front in the culture war.

In Valencia, they’re crowded enough that the debate should be about how to manage them.

I’d rather have that argument every day of the week.

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As a cyclist and urban cycling advocate in San Francisco circa 1999–2006, I was never in 100% unadulterated support of painted bike lanes.

I viewed them largely as government—city, state, federal—placation.

First, I didn’t think on-street bike lanes were always the answer to making the streets safer for cyclists. I still don’t. In fact, in some cases, they make the streets less safe. You know this if you ride in the street regularly.

In most places, cyclists have a right to the road. That includes the right to position themselves where it's safest—not where drivers think they should be. When you paint a bike lane on the side of the street, you also send a message that this is where cyclists belong. So when a cyclist leaves the bike lane and “takes” the traffic lane to avoid getting doored by a parked car, go around a double-parked vehicle, or for any other reason, car drivers often get more angry than usual.

There’s a bike lane there!

You fought for it so why aren’t you using it?

For the record, Spain recently passed a comprehensive law that includes requiring cyclists on urban roads to ride in the center of the lane rather than hugging the curb—a simple, practical measure to prevent dooring and aggressive passes.

Second, governments love to throw bones to not only placate activists but cleverly steer the progression of the conversation. It got to the point where activists started using the number of bike lanes as a measuring stick of success rather than focusing on true change—to the physical environment and to the prevailing car culture. Getting bike lane projects passed became the prevailing part of the fight. Bike coalitions and other advocacy groups around the world started proudly publishing statistics on how many bike lanes were installed over X number of years.

That’s basically where the United States has been stuck for years, but recently it appears to be getting unimaginably worse.

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Every week I write from Spain about cities, psychology, politics, and the everyday systems that shape how we live. I’d love to take the newsletter on the road more often and report from other cities like I did for all of this past April from Paris, but I can only do that with your support.

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It’s important to stop here and note that democratic politicians and policy makers have always—by and large—believed in and live life the American way. They drive from places like Maryland to DC for work and have homes in car-dependent suburbs.

Most Democratic politicians have never wanted to fundamentally rethink how Americans build cities. They want to make driving slightly less harmful—not less necessary. Bike lanes became an acceptable compromise because they didn't require challenging the underlying assumptions.

So don’t be surprised that the United States is in its present form on bike lanes and dozens of seemingly bigger issues. The country has been half-assing its way down a slippery slope for a long time.

But when I saw this on Substack, I couldn’t believe it was true.

But it is.

And it’s pathetic.

At first glance, an official DOT spokesperson ranting about 'eating crickets in shoebox apartments' feels like a satire piece. It doesn't feel real. But given the trajectory of American public life over the last few decades, it’s not surprising at all.

This bike lane situation is merely one illustration of something so tragic it literally makes me want to cry.

Across Europe, there remains a baseline of decency and sanity in the public sphere, even as the right and far right make gains in countries across the continent, including Spain. I can only hope Europe's different civic instincts keep it from sinking as low as the United States has.

For the time being, a key distinction still exists between the U.S. and much of Europe.

Society here still seems to believe that we owe each other functioning public space.

In the United States, more and more people seem to view public goods as zero-sum: if someone else benefits, they assume they're losing something.

Spain's democracy is only about as old as I am. I have to think that history—and Europe's broader skepticism of American-style politics—will cause enough people to push back if leaders here continue borrowing from Trump's playbook. I hope so, anyway. I'm just not sure Europe fully appreciates what it's signing up for if it moves to the right.

One of the hardest parts of what you sign up for when you elect populists isn’t only the politics.

It’s realizing you can no longer describe reality together.

My mother lives in a city along the Canadian border. During the recent wildfires she casually remarked, “Canada needs to get control of them.”

I knew exactly where that line came from.

Not because she’d studied wildfire management or suddenly become an expert on climate or forestry. She’d heard a version of it repeated often enough that it became reality.

That’s the tragedy.

The bike lane debate has little to do with bikes anymore. It's another version of the same tired story. Something designed to make a city slightly safer somehow becomes evidence that someone else is taking something from you.

The debate goes beyond transportation. It's about whether we still believe society owes strangers anything at all.

Yesterday I wrote about weak ties. Today's essay explores why I think we often misunderstand the role groups play in our lives.

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When I listen to Tom Petty, I’m instantly taken back to Los Angeles.

For a moment, nostalgia takes hold. It’s impossible for it not to.

Even though I wasn’t born in LA, the time I spent there—and in San Francisco—carved out who I am today. If it weren’t for California between 1999 and 2024, I wouldn’t be in Spain today.

That said, nostalgia is an extraordinarily talented film editor. It keeps the Tom Petty montage and cuts the less cinematic footage of why the United States isn’t the epicenter for quality of life—which explains part of why we left.

It’s all so fascinating and gets straight to the heart of the ideas I wrote about ahead of the move and continue to explore today.

The idea that my wife and I challenged ourselves out of a good situation in LA. We could have stayed and tolerated the components of daily life we didn’t like. We could have stayed and maintained basically the same way of being—personally and professionally. But doing so—particularly at midlife—felt like the wrong choice at a time ripe for resisting stagnation and working the body and mind in ways that no longer felt possible within the confines of our familiar life.

As we knew going into the move, the reward for making the right choice isn’t permanent certainty or emotional peace. Sometimes it’s equal parts satisfaction, exploration, and disorientation. Ultimately, we’ve surrendered the comfort of being surrounded by our accumulated identities, even though that comfort had become constraining.

Some people structure their lives primarily around security, belonging, and a dense social circle. I’ve generally structured mine around freedom, movement, observation, intellectual stimulation, and the ability to follow my own instincts. I’ve accepted the costs because the alternative—a more socially prescribed, settled, group-oriented life—makes me feel more trapped than connected.

In the shell of an overthought nut, sitting with uncomfortable feelings, making sense of them without overreacting—that's the nonstop psychological work of moving abroad.

Which brings us to the sequel to Saturday’s post on weak ties.

When people move abroad, one of the first pieces of advice they receive is to join something. Find an “expat” group. Take a class, sign up for a club, or attend organized events where you can meet people and start building a community.

Perfectly reasonable advice. It might even work for a lot of people.

But it has never felt quite right to me.

I’ve also noticed that some “expat” communities become places where people endlessly process the move itself—what they miss, what frustrates them, how this country compares with the last one. I understand the impulse. It just isn’t how I want to spend my time.

I didn’t move to Spain to build an expat life. I moved to build an ordinary life.

I didn’t move to Spain to replace one predetermined social structure with another. I’ve never had a ton of close friends. I tend to keep a loose social circle absent the “coffee hangs” and scheduled lunches that populate so many lives. So much of that feels like going through increasingly performative motions.

It’s funny—you can be a good friend even if you don’t have a ton of friends. But much of the world seems to operate using the opposite logic. People assemble “tribes” and love to count friends, which is part of why they use making friends and having a sizable friend group as a signal of success in new endeavors such as starting a job or moving abroad.

I've never understood why we treat making friends like a performance metric. But that’s the American way—find a way to operationalize and optimize everything. If you can make friends you’ve proven to yourself—and others—that you’re competent and a likable person. I prefer to sit with myself and be selective, which I think benefits me in the more formal social interactions I do have.

So maybe it will come as no surprise that I don’t think integration—if even possible when you move abroad—necessarily happens because you assemble a group of friends, fill your calendar, or demonstrate that you’re “putting yourself out there.”

Each of those things can serve important roles in your life—it’s not as if I never hang out with others in social settings—but people do much of the above to simply delay dealing with uncomfortable feelings like loneliness. When you move abroad, loneliness can become even more complicated. Because admitting it potentially signals to yourself and the world that you made the wrong decision.

I was thinking about this the other day.

My wife was taking an all-day class. After nearly six years together, I still miss her when she’s gone. So I was sitting in the plaza feeling lonely. I had nothing on my calendar—as I really don’t keep one of the social variety. I like to confront, rather than stave off loneliness and treat it like any other feeling. As I sat there, I recalled the times I sat on a bench on Larchmont Blvd in LA, feeling lonely when she was at work.

Short periods of loneliness help you find proper perspective and not overreact to fleeting emotional states. Having a Larchmont-bench day in a Russafa plaza is a great example of using loneliness to situate place and my perspective, and to remind myself why I’ve chosen the life I lead.

I sometimes wonder how many people mistake ordinary loneliness for a problem that needs to be solved immediately.

They move abroad and join a group.

They still feel disconnected. So they join another.

They still feel lonely—that “problem” was supposed to be solved by now.

So—and you hear this all of the time from popular relocation gurus—maybe it’s that they just haven’t found their people yet.

While that could very well be the case, it’s probably also a common misread of the situation.

Joining a group can absolutely enrich your life. I’ve done it at different points in mine.

But groups don’t eliminate loneliness. They just help hide it for the time being.

Every group eventually develops its own dynamics, hierarchies, rituals, personalities, and informal structures. That's simply group psychology. It isn't a criticism; it's what humans do.

If your primary goal was simply to understand yourself in a new country, you've now added another layer of psychology to navigate. It’s one thing to need motivation to wake up at 8 a.m. on Saturday morning to go for a jog. But there’s a good chance that peacocking, cliques, and other social status posturing will emerge among your fellow run club members.

I know that sometimes people just join a running club to run or a knitting club to knit. It doesn’t always have to be seen through some lofty psychological lens. And—quite often—fulfilling individual friendships emerge from these situations. No doubt. But I also know that sometimes we go into situations with remedies for problems we only anticipate experiencing—and those remedies can sell us short when it comes time to actually deal.

Groups are tools, not cures.

So I keep going back to weak ties. It was love at first sight when I discovered the concept in or around 2004.

Weak ties matter more than trying to force yourself into friendships and achieve the goal of integration through joining groups. Weak ties matter because they ask almost nothing of you. You don’t need to become someone’s best friend or perform belonging. All you need to do is simply begin participating in the seemingly mundane daily rhythm of a place.

I don’t think moving abroad has taught me how to avoid loneliness.

It’s taught me something I guess I’ve known all along—not to misinterpret it.

A lonely afternoon isn’t necessarily a sign that I chose the wrong country, failed to integrate, or need to immediately reinvent my social life.

Sometimes it’s just a lonely afternoon.

Which is exactly why I don’t think integration begins with joining groups.

I think it begins with giving yourself enough time to let the ordinary rhythms of a place slowly become your own.

Your search will result in a mountain of academic research.

Despite decades of testing the weak ties theory, I think the original logic still applies, particularly when we’re talking about the two things we talk about most in this newsletter—living city life in general and living it after moving abroad.

Introduced by sociologist Mark Granovetter on Stanford Report in 1973, the weak ties theory states that casual acquaintances and loose connections are more valuable than close bonds for sharing novel information and bridging separate social groups. In city life, these low-stakes interactions with neighbors and shopkeepers help prevent social isolation and integrate individuals into the broader urban fabric.

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I’ve been obsessed with this broad area of research since I enrolled in San Francisco State University’s urban studies program in 2002 and went on to pursue—and not complete—my PhD at UC-Irvine in 2006.

I became so obsessed that I wrote a paper on a concept that’s basically the complete opposite of weak ties. The paper—in one of the top five achievements of my life—passed peer review and made into an academic journal in 2008. (I know I mention that often, but I remain proud of it all these years later):

Creating “community” has long been a goal of urban planners. Although such rhetoric abounds in planning circles, what it all means is unclear. In this article, the authors review the community psychology and urban planning literature, defining sense of community within the context of how the built environment might facilitate or impede it. They then present their research, which tests the effects of “main street” on sense of community in four San Francisco neighborhoods. Results indicate that respondents in neighborhoods exhibiting characteristics of a main street town (Bernal Heights and West Portal) have significantly higher sense of community than do respondents from a high-density neighborhood (Nob Hill) and from a more suburban-style city neighborhood (Sunset).

If you’d like a copy of the full article, let me know and I’ll send one to you.

Anyway—

That’s the thing. We’ve been throwing around the phrase sense of community to describe the social relations we have in what we consider great neighborhoods and other settings, such as clubs, for years. While these social situations and groups might indeed be great and fulfilling, they don’t always cross the line into sense of community.

In between weak ties and sense of community—a mediator maybe—is social interaction.

This is where the rubber meets the road.

Consider the psychological construct of sense of community (SOC):

SOC has been defined as “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met by their commitment to be together”. As the definition indicates, SOC is an emotion-laden construct that stresses feelings of togetherness and a communal spirit....

The situation I’m in where—if everyone I “know” in the neighborhood happens to be in their “place” at the right time—is a far cry from sense of community.

I might walk out the door and have small talk with the guy who owns the store next door, say good morning to the guy who runs the bar on the other side next door, walk past the guy who sells eggs at the Russafa Market entrance and say hello, then have limited conversations in Spanish with the three or four vendors I regularly buy stuff from—all people who would recognize and acknowledge me if we bumped into one another on the street.

Those things rarely happen all at once—in succession—but they happen individually and in tandem every single day in the neighborhood.

Then, I can go to our coffee shop of choice—where they not only know my order, but once prepared it ahead of a line of tourists ordering complicated drinks, and where they know that I have a cortado when I’m about to go on a bike ride, but an Americano when I’m not riding.

On a recent weekend bike ride, I wound up in a plaza in the center of the city. A Spaniard friend was out for a run. We randomly bumped into one another, talked, and took a picture together to send to our wives. We’ll have dinner or something next month. We like each other a lot.

We’re going to our Puerto Rican friends’ house for dinner this weekend. Other Spanish/German friends let us know they’re heading out on summer vacation and, if we can’t meet up Saturday, we’ll see one another when they get back.

We might be compelled to say—wow, you’re experiencing sense of community in your neighborhood. But if you simply look at the introductory definition, you’ll see that this isn’t the case. Dive deeper into the research on SOC and I have nothing close to sense of community.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s a good thing.

As a society, we have taken sense of community—unknowingly—from academia and turned it into a popular term that even professionals, such as urban planners, loosely throw around, as I observed in 2008.

Nothing has changed—at all.

I have weak ties in my neighborhood, which is basically a nonstop accumulation of informal social interaction. Some of it could one day cross from formal informality among forced acquaintances to actual friendships you’ll maintain and develop with people over time.

It’s this mix that matters more in your day-to-day life than trying to build what amounts to a complicated bond. In fact, it's close to literally impossible for this mix I’m in—really any substantial part of it—to convert into a sense of community. There simply isn’t enough shared identity or history. Plus, there’s a language barrier. But even among people who are friendly and speak the same language, it’s unlikely that there’s actual SOC.

Which leads to the tragedy of suburbia. When you live in the suburbs, you have people on either side of you and these are the people who are part of your immediate day-to-day life beyond your family and actual friends. Then the suburbanite gets in their car, maybe stops at Starbucks—where you can literally just take your order off of the table now without interacting with a soul—and goes about their socially isolated day until they mingle with their co-workers.

Their place of work takes on increased importance—just like their immediate neighbors. These people better be cool if I want to have anything resembling a fulfilling social life outside of my immediate circle. Some hit the jackpot on all or some of this. Others don’t.

Only compact city neighborhoods can naturally and regularly produce what I have—weak ties constructed through constant informal social interaction. And that’s the beauty of functioning urban neighborhoods and the accumulation of encounters they uniquely facilitate. With them you feel like you’re part of something—part of the urban theater. And from that you can slowly build something bigger and more rooted, which is part of why I like to travel frequently, but have no interest in being a digital nomad.

Without this quintessentially urban dynamic, you run the risk of feeling isolated. I don’t believe in joining groups as a way to “integrate” into a new situation—at home or abroad. Because when you do you just place yourself inside another complicated area of academia—group psychology.

No matter why they joined, in groups people emerge to take the same roles that exist in every other group. And, typically, it becomes more about peacocking, dick measuring, and establishing social status than it does having fulfilling things to do and exploring potential friendships with one another.

I don’t think the goal of city life—or of moving abroad—is to create an instant sense of community.

It’s to stop feeling like a visitor—and like less of an imposter.

Weak ties, repeated encounters, and countless ordinary interactions do that better than almost anything else.

They’re easy to overlook because they’re so ordinary.

They’re also one of the most extraordinary things that well-functioning neighborhoods can provide.

If this essay changed the way you think about neighborhoods—even a little—that’s exactly why I write this newsletter.

Every week I explore the hidden systems that shape everyday life, from city streets to banking to the psychology of belonging.

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All of that has gone down pretty much as hoped and expected.

Other than typical language learning obstacles, I’ve found myself right at home where it matters and where it’s possible as an American. One who has written about my country’s shortcomings for the better part of the last three decades.

I don’t believe in many elements of the American way so—all along really—Spain made complete sense.

But realizing where the United States has fallen woefully short in areas such as urban planning, public policy, and overall quality of life doesn’t mean you’re immune to American indoctrination. I arrived in Europe thinking that the United States was the primary innovator in the space I’ve been writing about for 20 years—finance.

I was wrong.

What surprised me wasn't simply that Europe had caught up. It was that, in several of the most important areas of consumer finance, it has moved ahead—and many American companies haven't fully recognized it yet.

Between Europe’s push for payments sovereignty and the rise of companies such as Revolut and bunq, the continent is reshaping how people bank, move money, borrow, invest, and travel. Much of it is happening amid remarkably little attention in the United States.

I write about what living in Europe allows me to see differently—from finance and cities to everyday quality of life. Subscribe to follow along.

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Three months ago I started pitching what I thought was an undercovered story to finance editors.

The argument is simple...

The small handful of outlets I sent my story to—mostly in the United States—didn’t buy my pitch.

Last weekend, The Economist published essentially the same thesis.

I’ll be the first to admit it. I talk a lot. Sometimes I even rant.

But the reality is that I really don’t enjoy hearing the sound of my own voice. And I don’t like blowing smoke up people’s asses—especially editors and readers who spend precious time with what I write.

The rejection of my pitch, in part, reflects the reality of pitching as a freelance writer: it’s a numbers game and, often, when you pitch a story like this, the outlet already has people working on or able to work on the same line of thinking. While I didn’t pitch this particular story to The Economist, they don’t need me to tell them what’s up.

That said, there are others who should know better and realize a good, forward-looking story before other, higher-end outlets—such as The Economist—get around to it. When they don’t, I’m convinced that part of the reason is the American indoctrination I mentioned earlier.

An editor can have a writer they know and trust saying:

I’m in Spain. I'm watching this happen in real time. And I don’t think people in the United States—including many banks and fintechs—realize the gravity of the situation. This is about to be a big story and it has massive implications for American companies.

Yet the story still feels easy to dismiss because it challenges an assumption that’s deeply embedded in American thinking: that the most important financial innovation will naturally originate in the United States.

It’s not arrogance so much as perspective—a mix of preconceived notions filtering out worldviews you’re not close to or haven't experienced. If you don't see it, you don't even begin to try to understand it.

When you’ve spent your entire career inside the world’s dominant financial market, it’s difficult to imagine meaningful innovation emerging somewhere else first. But that’s exactly what’s happening.

From here, it doesn’t feel surprising anymore. It feels obvious.

Because the writing on the wall for the United States is hiding in plain sight—in Europe.

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The story has two distinct but connected threads.

The first is deliberate and straightforward. European policymakers increasingly want to reduce the continent’s dependence on American-controlled payment infrastructure through initiatives such as the digital euro and homegrown payment networks like Spain’s Bizum—a payment platform similar to Venmo or Zelle.

The second is almost happening by accident. European fintechs like Revolut and bunq are well-prepared to challenge American financial dominance. There are others I won’t mention here. And some don’t originate in Europe—such as Brazilian fintech behemoth Nubank.

These companies are building products around how an increasing number of people around the world actually live and manage money. In doing so, they’ve ended up creating banking and lifestyle experiences that many Americans would find surprisingly unfamiliar—and, in many cases, superior.

Together, these two forces are creating something few Americans have noticed: Europe is improving its financial system and beginning to export its model.

It’s probably best to “show you” what I’m talking about with part of a recent pitch and links to two articles that did get picked up. Together they help tell the story that’s about to catch many Americans by surprise:

The Financial Superapp That’s Coming to America

…Right now, most Americans still use multiple apps and institutions to manage money, travel, investing, payments, foreign exchange, and life across borders. A growing number of Europeans don’t. For example, more than 80% of Irish adults bank with Revolut. Here in Spain—Revolut’s third largest market—the company has over six million accounts and is rapidly expanding.

In Europe, finance is becoming a lifestyle—or at least that’s how many companies like Revolut are selling it. They’re combining travel, payments, investing, airport lounges, eSIMs, foreign exchange, and other services into superapps that feel less like banks and more like consumer brands.

As Revolut and others prepare for a much larger U.S. push, the appeal could be strong, in part because the United States doesn’t have a financial superapp…

I believe Revolut will end up one of the biggest consumer-facing developments in the US since Apple introduced the iPhone. While social media, streaming, and AI have transformed parts of our lives, they largely grew on top of the ecosystem the iPhone created. The iPhone won because it absorbed dozens of previously separate experiences into a single relationship—not because it’s a better phone.

Now Revolut is executing a variation of that globally, with the U.S. its next and most ambitious target.

The eventual story will be that Europe built a different kind of consumer brand—one that happened to emerge from finance.

At its core, this is a story about a shift in how people spend, travel, and navigate daily life—and the companies positioning themselves around those expectations and experiences.

The United States gave the world Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the iPhone. Now, one of the most ambitious consumer platforms of the next decade is set to arrive from Europe—and most Americans still have no idea it exists.

4 Reasons JPMorgan Should Buy Revolut

What if Revolut Isn’t the Only Threat? How Santander Is Quietly Targeting the US

The implications don’t stop with Revolut.

They extend to JPMorgan, Santander/Openbank, payments, and Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

And ultimately to who controls two things: the infrastructure of money and the largest number of consumer accounts over the next decade.

That’s the intersection where all of this essentially ties together.

Let’s sketch it out.

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Last month, I had a great conversation with Felipe Peñacoba Martinez, CEO of Getnet Platforms Payments Hub (a Santander company) and former CIO of Revolut Bank (EU).

The title is a mouthful, but it’s important because few people have seen this transformation from both sides. Peñacoba Martinez helped build one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs before returning to one of the world’s largest traditional banks.

His perspective reinforced something I'd already begun to suspect: the distinction between banks and fintechs is disappearing. Traditional banks are becoming technology companies, while fintechs increasingly want to become global banks.

Santander isn’t trying to be the Santander of twenty years ago. Through its broader One Transformation strategy, it’s trying to become a different kind of bank altogether—one that competes with digital-first companies on their own terms while leveraging the trust, balance sheet and global reach only an incumbent can provide.

That helps explain why Santander isn’t simply defending itself against Revolut. It’s expanding aggressively through Openbank, targeting the United States, and investing heavily in payments infrastructure through businesses like Getnet.

At the same time, JPMorgan is pushing deeper into Europe.

Everyone is crossing the Atlantic. That alone tells us something. We’re looking at a global competition to define what banking looks like over the next decade.

Payments sit at the center of that battle.

For decades, Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay and Google Pay have occupied an extraordinarily powerful position in global commerce. European policymakers increasingly see that dependence as both an economic and geopolitical vulnerability.

That's why initiatives like the digital euro and payment systems such as Bizum matter far beyond Europe. They’re all about reducing dependence on American-controlled infrastructure.

That’s one story.

The other is unfolding almost independently.

While governments debate sovereignty, companies like Revolut have built products that feel remarkably well suited to modern life.

Most Americans still piece together a financial life from multiple relationships. One bank. Apps for payments, investing, travel, foreign exchange, budgeting, and maybe a phone plan or eSIM.

Increasingly, many Europeans don’t have to.

Revolut bundles banking, investing, international transfers, travel insurance, airport lounges, eSIMs, budgeting tools, foreign exchange and now an expanding payments ecosystem into a single consumer relationship. Revolut Pay extends that ecosystem beyond banking itself, giving merchants and customers another way to transact that bypasses some of the traditional payment rails.

Revolut says it wants to become one of the world's largest banks. But even that undersells its ambition. It’s really trying to become the default interface through which you manage money.

Revolut has made the United States its next major growth market, while bunq is entering the country with a strategy built around globally mobile professionals and digital nomads. Neither company is treating America as a side project. Both believe the American banking experience is fragmented enough that a different model can compete.

None of these companies needed to set out to challenge the United States. They simply built products around how millions of people increasingly live—working remotely, traveling frequently, moving across borders and expecting technology to eliminate problems instead of creating them.

That’s why I don’t think this story is ultimately about banking.

It’s about consumer expectations.

Whoever owns that relationship will eventually have extraordinary influence over how people spend, save, invest, borrow and travel.

For much of the last half century, Americans understandably assumed those companies would emerge from Wall Street or Silicon Valley. Today, many of them are emerging from Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere across Europe.

That’s the real story.

It’s also why moving to Spain changed how I see finance.

Because living here forced me to question an assumption I didn’t even realize I was making: that if something important was happening in finance, America would be leading it.

Increasingly, that’s no longer true.

And I have a feeling that over the next few years, many Americans are going to discover what I’ve spent the last eighteen months watching unfold from Europe.

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The waiting was the hardest part.

When I become impatient, I set targets. I do it all of the time with work. If an editor isn’t buying what I’m selling, I quickly create a list of other outlets that might be interested in my point of view.

So I set a goal: I wanted to turn 50 in Spain.

We joke about that sometimes now because—I’ll admit it—my impatience is often a mix of anxiety and fear of missing out. And it often comes because the time leading up to something I want badly—an article commission, a big move—moves too slowly for my liking.

Sometimes that way of being serves me well.

That said, as I turn 51 today—in Spain—it feels less like an achievement and more like life.

Somewhere between 50 and 51, a few things happened that I wasn’t quite expecting.

If you’ve enjoyed these essays about building a life abroad—not just moving abroad—I’d love to have you as a subscriber.

Free subscribers receive every essay by email, and paid subscribers help make this work possible while getting occasional members-only posts and deeper reflections that I don’t publish publicly.

One recent free-to-paid subscriber wrote this after reading these essays:

“I feel it’s the same in transitioning to any big life change, and applies so much to what we experienced in selling everything and moving onto a sailboat.”

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I still set work targets, goals, and challenges, but even they happen as part of the process. These days, I’m less worried about getting to a specific point in time and more concerned with trying to enjoy the process. If anything, I’ve transferred the I need to do this by then long-term anxiety into wanting to ensure I make the most of each day.

More importantly, I've started to notice that I look at many of the same things I've always cared about through an entirely different lens.

For example, on Thursday I took a walk with my wife, rode my bike to the beach, did a Bikram yoga class, worked for a few hours, watched the Tour de France, went to the market, and ate well throughout the day, which takes a little effort.

On paper, it sounds like a hectic day.

Two years ago, it might have been a frantic process that involved cars and unpleasant walks. Today, it happens with a fluidity I’ve never experienced in my life.

That gets at something else that changed almost without me realizing it.

I'm now far removed from the version of everyday life I spent nearly fifty years living in the United States—a life where driving, traffic, and timing often dictated what was realistically possible on any given day. Where it regularly degraded my intention and desire to do things in life—and get the most out of my days.

This shift has redefined the way I write.

Like most Americans, I spent nearly fifty years assuming the American way was the default against which everything else gets measured. Living in Europe hasn't completely eliminated that instinct, but it has forced me to question it every day. I don’t think you can be born and bred in the United States and not operate—at least some of the time—from this bias.

Whether I’m writing about finance, cities, transportation, food, or simply a day in Valencia or somewhere else in Europe, I now find myself asking a different question:

How do different places solve the same problem?

For example, I don’t agree with every innovation or aggressive move European banks and fintechs make. But I’ve come to appreciate that, in many ways, they’re solving problems American companies often haven’t even decided to tackle. I had about zero clue that this was the case until we settled firmly in Spain.

From the perspective of someone who just loves cities, I’ve come to realize that no classroom or vacation can illustrate the extent to which American city urban planning has failed on its own and relative to much of Europe. When you live it in your daily life and smart city planning principles become your baseline rather than your dream—what you long for and sometimes fight for—the perspective shift gets driven home.

The bottom line is simple.

I’m no longer writing from inside the United States.

I’m writing from Europe—not as a tourist, and no longer as someone adjusting to life here, but as someone whose everyday assumptions have changed.

That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring about the United States. If anything, I probably think about it more. I just think about it differently.

Fifty-one hasn’t given me all of the answers, but—more so—enough distance to recognize that my perspective has changed.

I can’t think of a better time to have such a seismic shift in perspective. It’s as scary as it is intriguing—not to mention life-changing and boringly utilitarian in my everyday life and work.

I haven’t come to conclusions over this last 18 months as much as I’ve let them come to me.

If you’ve been reading these essays for a while, maybe you’ve noticed the shift too.

They started as stories about moving abroad. But they’re becoming stories about perspective. And that’s where this newsletter has arrived.

If you’re European and curious how someone raised in the United States slowly came to see this continent differently, I hope you’ll stick around.

If you’re American who’s convinced we can build better cities, better systems, and ultimately better everyday lives, I hope you’ll stick around too.

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Think about what that actually assumes.

It assumes the point was novelty.

Like buying a new car, getting a new phone, or giving a kid a new toy.

It’s akin to giving a child something they’re only excited about playing with for a few weeks or months. Adults like to say they got bored and moved on, but kids don’t get bored because novelty disappears.

The child sets the toy aside and starts playing with other objects in their environment not strictly classified as toys.

You see it all the time—like the other day in the plaza near our apartment. A bunch of kids were running around with a tree branch as bikes, balls, and other “toys” sat idle. The best moments on the playground are when it’s packed and nobody’s using any of the structures. Your kids are off in the corner playing footsie with a bug.

Children invent and reinvent within the settings and contexts at their disposal. They’re constantly cycling through their environment as the process of growth happens—seemingly—in the background.

When you move abroad—or do anything else that’s truly life-changing—you have to be that kid who craves a setting that allows them to live—to explore without restrictions. But you need the conditions that make a spare tire sitting off to the side every bit as interesting as a shiny new Playstation.

My wife and I didn’t move to Spain because we wanted to feel like we were on vacation forever. We didn’t move because we wanted to live permanently inside the honeymoon phase.

I called bullshit on the idea of a honeymoon phase before we moved and I call bullshit on it to this day.

We moved because we wanted ordinary life to require something of us.

We moved because we wanted to build a life that required us to keep growing—to keep challenging ourselves.

In fact, we challenged ourselves out of a good situation in Los Angeles. It wasn’t like life was bad there. We had it relatively good. We made the best out of LA.

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We left because:

We both have some variation of the personality I described the other day:

All of this developed over time, but curiosity, movement, and reconstruction—for the most part—always remained constant.

A desire to know and experience what else is out there—not on a whim, but as part of a comprehensive outlook on life. One informed by watching other people turn their comfortable situations into stagnation and, in some cases, bitterness. I watched that process unfold one too many times among some family members and friends.

Some people stay put and leverage a comfortable situation—there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. I see mountains of people I know crushing and truly enjoying life in LA and elsewhere around the world. But there’s a difference between the success stories of life in one place or at one job—between staying open and letting anxiety and fear close you off to the rest of the world, which you often end up just hating on.

Plus—in pure practical terms—if you want to live life without a car in an environment conducive to walking, biking, and taking transit in a society with much less hostility and superior social and physical infrastructure, you pretty much have no choice but to leave the United States for any number of other countries.

Again, it comes down to specific situations and tradeoffs—neither are the same across the United States, the world, or from one overthinking mind to another.

Taken together then, how in the world do you make a serious move abroad then fall victim to the honeymoon period?

I just don’t understand it.

I’m learning Spanish. I still suck, but I’m a hell of a lot better than I was when we arrived here to live 18 months ago.

I’m transitioning my career to one where I focus on writing about what’s happening in Europe—be it in my life, on the streets, or in finance. Out of necessity and out of a desire to evolve.

My wife is building a new career as a ceramicist. It’s the logical next step for an ambitious woman who helped build a successful business in Los Angeles and has the desire to put her common sense, sharp acumen, immense natural talent, and ability to learn fast with clarity and competence in a setting that challenges her every single day.

I’m riding my bike hard—in the city—almost every day. We’re taking the most demanding yoga and pilates classes of our lives four times a week. We’re setting up new systems and structures. The alternative could very well have been hitting a comfortable wall and not feeling like we had any reason to push through to the other side.

Then you decide what to do—if anything—and where to go—if anywhere—because you're thinking clearly rather than reacting.

That’s a realization you need to come to before it comes to you.

Only then does the question become: What does a good Tuesday actually look like?

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This is what I do most weekdays—so, it’s a typical Tuesday.

• Wake up around 7 or 8 a.m.

• Make coffee.

• Wake up my wife.

• Work for 45 minutes to an hour.

• Go the the municipal market.

• Work for another hour.

• Have coffee at a local café.

• 3-4 days a week either walk with my wife or take a bike ride—sometimes both.

• Work for another couple of hours.

• Run errands, such as the supermarket.

• 4 days a week—Bikram yoga or hot pilates.

• Dinner, relax inside or outside of house, or both.

• Go to be around Midnight.

The days are just longer here in Spain—especially in summer—and I love that.

Cities here are built for living morning, noon, and night.

That “schedule” is somehow—simultaneously—the most exciting and the most boring thing about my life.

It gets mixed up on the weekends with different flows. And—every once a while—travel gets thrown into the mix.

It’s boring, thrilling, and challenging all at the same time.

One of my most popular and misunderstood Medium articles—I think I’m going to call it my Born in the USA—is one where I think more than a few people didn’t read past the title.

Which ties directly to some of the simplest, but best lyrics ever written by an underrated songwriter known as Mike Ness of Social Distortion:

Well, I've searched and I've searched
To find the perfect life
A brand new car and a brand new suit
I even got me a little wife
But wherever I have gone
I was sure to find myself there
You can run all your life
But not go anywhere

Real boredom isn’t the absence of novelty. You don’t need novelty to grow—in fact, you’re probably better off without it. There’s no novelty in our Bikram yoga practice—26 postures, 2 times each, for 90 minutes every class—or in pedaling a bicycle. They’re effectively routines that produce physical and mental rewards and benefits.

A routine isn’t stagnation. It’s both the platform from which you do life and the proof that wherever you go, there you are doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.

It’s the structure that allows you to become a little better at whatever matters to you—language, a career, your health, or just understanding yourself.

That’s why I don’t think moving abroad is something you do to “find yourself.”

That framing has always struck me as backwards—if not foolish.

If you hope and expect that another country will tell you who you are, you're asking geography to solve a psychological problem. You might get lucky. More often, you'll end up disappointed because no place—not Spain, not Japan, not Italy, not anywhere—is responsible for giving your life direction.

Before you arrive, there needs to be at least some idea of what you’re trying to build.

The setting can then make building that life more likely.

That’s a completely different way of thinking about moving abroad.

You’re not just looking for a country. You're looking for an environment where your ordinary days reinforce the person you’ve always been blending with the one you're trying to become.

At this point, I think the honeymoon period does more harm than good. It encourages people to expect the wrong thing from one of the biggest decisions they'll ever make. Every pro-move, pre-big life change masterclass that warns about the honeymoon phase leaves another person less prepared for their transition than they otherwise could be.

Mike Ness nailed it.

Ideally, you’re not running away from or towards anything that matters—and you’re definitely not trying to outrun yourself.

Learning a second language at 50—I’ll turn 51 this Saturday—is a lifelong journey. Same goes for careers, exercise, travel, and getting the most out of your daily routines.

At least it is for me.

And you don’t—you can’t—do these types of things within the confines and context of a fleeting period of time where the novelty and excitement eventually wears off. The honeymoon period in relation to moving abroad is a nonsensical oversimplification of epic proportion.

It reduces one of the biggest decisions you'll ever make to a phase instead of a way of living.

It treats building a life like a vacation.

It isn't.

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For me, it couldn’t be more backwards.

Spain wasn’t the beginning of the story. It was the continuation of one that started when I was nineteen. I was only nineteen.

In the spring of 1995, I left my hometown in Western New York for South Florida and my first full-time job in radio, a goal I’d been working toward since before I was a teenager. I landed my first paying radio job in 1988—when I was thirteen—after spending years pestering everyone I could at a tiny AM station in Niagara Falls. A station that proved WKRP in Cincinnati to be true to real life.

The particulars aren’t especially important.

What matters is that when I drove south in 1995, I made a decision that would ultimately shape the rest of my life.

If you'd met me in 1995, you wouldn't have met some globally minded future immigrant. You would've met a twenty-year-old from Western New York who had barely seen the world and thought he already understood a lot more of it than he actually did. As much as I hate to admit it, if you’d shown that kid Donald Trump the politician, he likely would’ve supported him.

What mattered wasn't that I knew where I was going or who I’d end up being. I absolutely didn't. However, I had already become comfortable betting on uncertainty. I was willing to leave before I knew exactly what came next. That temperament—not Spain—turned out to be the constant.

I had already decided that I was willing to accept the tradeoffs that come with refusing to let geography—or one career, one city, or one version of life—define me.

Looking back, that decision mattered more than a destination ever could.

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Everything that came afterward—San Francisco, 25 years total in California, academia, cycling, cities, journalism, bartending, eventually Spain—sprung from same willingness to keep moving toward whatever felt most alive, even when it meant leaving something else behind.

I think that’s a large part of why today—on the verge of 51—I’ve become so certain of how I want to spend my time and the people, places, and things I want to spend it with. I’ve come to the point where I can hold that list of people, places, and things in the palm of two hands.

When I left home—long before the age of reason—I had no clue that I’d fall in love with food, drink, cities, cycling, and all things urban planning. I already loved Bruce Springsteen, but had no idea I’d end up appreciating Tom Petty even more. I had no idea that I’d discover and add Elliott Smith, Social Distortion, Gaslight Anthem, and Old 97s to my favorites list. It never entered my imagination that, when I opened Spotify—yes, I still use Spotify—at age 50, I’d go for Spanish music because I like it and because it aids in the struggle of learning a second language.

All of this developed over time, but curiosity, movement, and reconstruction—for the most part—always remained constant.

A conservative kid from the northeast ends up in Miami not because he was dying to live in South Florida with the fruits and nuts, but because he has a radio career he was assembling. That’s part of a mindset that—if you have just a slice of open-mindedness somewhere in there—invites the evolution of curiosity, movement, and reconstruction that can change a human being.

Over time, I wasn’t merely curious about, moving for, or reconstructing my career—packin' and unpackin', town to town, up and down the dial—for radio. I was doing it because I started to discover that there was so much in the world I rejected as a teenager.

I developed a thirst for environments I had little experience with as a kid. Places I never imagined living, filled with people I never imagined living around.

All I know is that I’m lucky I became obsessed with radio at such a young age. It provided a way out of a place that—had I stayed—would’ve made it much more difficult to change. It would have stifled—if not rendered impossible—the ability to do what I did: continue to add and remove inaccurate and incomplete conceptions of the world from my view of it. You simply can’t go through this process unless you cast a net past the place you’re from and continue to widen that net throughout the years.

When you leave where you’re from and end up in a place that’s literally the complete opposite, you either go back home scared or keep casting a wider net. I witnessed more than one friend from my childhood take option one. But radio kept me out there—and the longer it did, the less staying away from home was about radio. It’s when pure curiosity, movement, and reconstruction took hold.

A concrete example: While in Boston to do my radio show from the 1999 Major League Baseball All-Star, I didn’t go to the game, even though my network provided a ticket and expected me to be there to mingle with sponsors. Professionally, I made the wrong decision, but in Boston I became obsessed with the city—with the city as an idea butting up against a place to live. So I spent as much time as I could wandering around it.

Long story short—that helped accelerate a move out of radio that was already in play. I was living in Las Vegas at the time for a temporary radio gig, mainly because I needed a job and wanted to work with a guy named Jay Clark.

With Boston fresh, life made it possible for me to move to San Francisco. At the time, people had called Boston the San Francisco of the West Coast. Turns out that that was a simplified version of reality, but it’s only an accumulation of experience that allows me to come to that conclusion today.

San Francisco continued the process of showing me what cities in the United States can be—and where they lack, particularly when compared to their European counterparts. So I enrolled in an urban studies program and became a student—really, an academic—for a solid eight years. During that time frame, I got into writing and riding my bike. Those experiences have persisted personally and professionally to this day.

So you can see the development I’m talking about here and how the progression of my life led me naturally to Spain. In many ways, Spain—or some variation of it—became inevitable. Because I knew enough about myself years after California became home—through accumulated experience, not to mention trial and error—to be certain about where I wanted to go, who I wanted to go with, and why.

At 25, everything interested me.

At 50, nothing and everything interests me.

That’s an important distinction. It’s just that somehow the combination of age and experience keeps you openminded enough to let new things in, but closed-minded enough to stop wasting your time and energy on—okay, cringe me and kill me for saying this—what doesn’t serve you.

But it’s true—as that person I love doing life with, my wife—likes to say!

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Somewhere along the way, I also accepted something that people don’t like talking about when they romanticize moving abroad.

When you choose a place—when you choose a different path for your life—you do so at the expense of another. You loosen the relatively firm connection you once had with old routines, and, inevitably, some people. Distance redraws relationships no matter how much everyone involved wants to resist it.

This doesn’t mean you don’t hold onto the people you love. Of course, you do.

However, it’s a reality of life. If you want to grow and you want to see others grow (especially your kids), this process might be an inevitable ingredient in that growth.

That’s sad sometimes. It should be. But, to me, it’s also happy tears. Hanging onto the past often means you’re stuck in it. In that context, you—in concert with the other people around you—often bring or keep one another down. I’ve seen it play out so many times in my family and others.

This doesn’t mean tradition or choosing to do a life’s work go by the wayside. I’m only writing about my experience here, which fits with my personality. The key is truly finding a way to know who you are without letting where you are—when you’re in your teens, 20s, 30s, and 40s—completely define and destine you.

The losses you experience along the way equal the price of living the sort of life I’ve apparently been trying to build since I was nineteen.

Today, I know what a good Tuesday looks like—only because I’ve experienced so many different Tuesdays in my life. A few I’d like to forget. And more than a few that keep nostalgia alive, not as a way to ramble about how I miss things, but to ramble more productively about what I’m experiencing now.

I wake up next to my wife in a neighborhood we love. I write, ride my bike, and walk to the market. I’m slowly becoming a known entity in the neighborhood. I obsess over cities, public policy, food, music, and whatever idea has gotten stuck in my head that week. We plan the next trip—not because we’re searching for somewhere better, but because my wife and I remain curious about how other people have chosen to live, what other places look like, and how they feel.

None of that makes Spain perfect. It doesn’t erase the tradeoffs. It doesn't mean there aren't days when I wish I could teleport back to California to sit in the Frolic Room or see an Old 97s show with my kid.

It simply means I’ve finally reached a point where the life I live each day resembles the one I’d been unknowingly assembling for the last thirty years.

Looking back, that’s what all those moves were really about.

Not finding myself.

Just slowly building a life that made it easier to be the person I’d been becoming all along.

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I realize this won’t describe everyone’s experience. It isn’t meant to. It’s simply the clearest articulation I’ve been able to arrive at after spending the better part of two years living one of the biggest decisions my wife and I have ever made.

I spent years thinking about this move before we made it. Now I spend just as much time thinking about what actually happened after we arrived.

Just nuance inside a real view of what it’s like to leave your home country with full intention to never return.

A few weeks ago, I wrote:

The scary part that I think people should at least try to consider before moving is that there’s no undo button. This isn’t some boy-turning-into-a-man type of thing. It’s a feeling I’m not sure you can anticipate, even if you attempt to consider it in advance.

You can change forever without ever becoming someone else.

Context changes your situation, your view of the world and the place you’re from. It likely impacts your relationship with other people—strangers, people in your home country, people in your new country, family, friends, whatever.

But context isn’t only your surroundings or some basic we’re living the American dream in Spain nonsense. The meaningful context is the reality that when you move, stay long enough, and make your new country home, there really is no undo button. You have changed your life—and your perspective—forever. No matter what you do from here—go “home,” move someplace else, join a band—you function in a new context.

However, like so much else in life, you have to let yourself go there.

To me, this means stripping away parts of yourself that were shaped more by environment than personality. You don't lose yourself. You simply begin to understand yourself in a different context.

I do firmly believe that all of the little bullshit, small talk conversations we have in life reflect something bigger, particularly when they occur within the context of living abroad—with fellow immigrants (some who call themselves “expats”), locals, and others.

For example, the food isn’t spicy here OR you can’t find spicy food here—a common grievance people file with Spanish cuisine or restaurants in general in Spain. Whenever I hear these conversations, I find myself tuning out the literal complaint and focusing on something else entirely.

We can get into a debate about spicy versus flavorful and how different cuisines use spice and flavor—independent of one another or in conjunction—but that’s not the thrust of this conversation. But suffice to say falling back on spice as a barometer for food quality or the enjoyment you derive from it is tantamount to telling the bartender to make your vodka drink “stronger.”

The deeper meaning here is that people come into life abroad with a whole host of things they’re going to say before they even know they’re going to say them. Before they even set foot to live—for example—on Spanish soil, they’re armed to repeat what others have repeated a zillion times before them and treat it as fact and a way to fit in.

From spicy food to the apparently slow, bungled bureaucracy, there’s so much nonsense spewed. And all of it really amounts to people performing cultural scripts they learned before they even entered their new environment.

Like my favorite sociologist, Erving Goffman, said:

When an actor takes on an established social role, he usually finds that a particular front has already been established for it.

You enter situations with scripts that groups of people have agreed on as anticipated and appropriate for those situations, then you regurgitate them. Whether it’s about spicy food, bureaucracy, or something else entirely, it doesn’t matter if you’re saying the same thing as everybody else says. It’s your way of connecting and establishing a baseline of loose connection.

In isolation, what’s the big deal? You’d have to be a psychopath—or a real asshole—to analyze small talk like this. Maybe so. But when you add up all of the little micro interactions people have in everyday life, the sum is more meaningful—and consequential—than its parts.

In this process, you don't lose yourself. More often, you stunt your own evolution.

Whether you agree with them or not, it’s not inherently a problem that people complain about spicy food or bureaucracy. The problem is that they never stop long enough to ask why they're saying these things in the first place.

Most of these observations aren't really observations at all. They're performances—social scripts people use to reaffirm who they already believe themselves to be or think they need to be.

To be clear, we all do this. We all perform different versions of ourselves depending on the situation. The question is whether you're willing to let the performance evolve when your life changes.

Goffman believed that much of social life consists of performances that help us establish what others should expect from us and what we should expect from them.

When the American in Spain complains that the food isn’t spicy enough, or that the bureaucracy is impossible, or that things don’t work “efficiently,” they’re often doing something much bigger than expressing a preference.

Very often, they’re reaffirming who they already believe themselves to be.

I’m convinced this is a large part of why some people fail abroad—or spend way too much time questioning their experience and asking themselves and others if they really like it in a place and want to stay.

Because they weren't trying to deepen their understanding of themselves. They were trying to take on an identity that had already been written for them.

How many people move abroad because—low, or not so low-key—they want to become or identify as:

• the digital nomad

• the retiree

• the European

• the expat

• the guy who “escaped Trump”

• the woman who “found herself in Tuscany”

Every single one of these identities already comes with a script.

If you arrive in another country already knowing exactly who you're supposed to become there, you've eliminated the possibility that the experience might change you in a meaningful way while still allowing you to remain yourself.

Spain didn’t turn me into somebody else.

• I still love Springsteen.

• I still obsess over urban planning.

• I still drink Fernet.

• I still ride my bike.

• I still write essays that are too long.

• I still think about things far more than is healthy.

I’m still me.

I just exist in an environment where it’s easier to be me. Where my everyday life doesn’t fight my instincts and preferences.

That was a big part of the reason why we moved in the first place: to live in a city where we didn’t have to compromise how we really want to live—practically—in the day to day.

When people talk about moving abroad, they often talk as if immigration is an exercise in self-transformation. You reinvent yourself, become an “expat” or digital nomad, and find yourself.

While this might work for some of the people some of the time, I don’t think it works for most of the people most of the time.

Spain didn’t give me a new personality.

It removed enough friction that I could more clearly see the one I’d had all along. The things that mattered to me before I moved still matter to me now. They simply exist in a context that reinforces them rather than constantly working against them.

When I walk down the street or ride my bike, my built environment and a vast majority of the people in it respect my choice. When I walk out the door, I don’t feel like I’m being ripped off by paying outrageous prices for shitty quality food.

I didn’t move to Spain and suddenly decide I cared about public transportation.

I always cared about public transportation.

I didn’t suddenly become interested in cities, public space, walkability, food quality and food shopping, or spending less time in a car.

Those preferences were already there.

That’s why moving abroad isn’t an act of blind optimism. At least it shouldn’t be.

It’s one of the biggest bets you’ll ever make on yourself. On your judgment and on whether you actually understand yourself as well as you think you do.

The longer I live in Spain, the more I think that’s the real gamble—not whether the country will live up to the brochures, but whether you actually know yourself well enough to choose the right place.

When people arrive armed with scripts, they cockblock the process before it really has a chance to begin. They perform a part they rehearsed a million times in their head in their old setting and never let their new context fully take center stage.

So every inconvenience risks becoming evidence that the country is wrong. They complain about every instance of discomfort and treat it like a problem to solve. They filter every experience through an identity they constructed on YouTube and in Facebook Groups before they ever got on the plane.

The irony in all of this is that many people move abroad because they want to change their lives. Then they spend years trying to preserve the exact version of themselves their old life created, using social media as a crutch to endlessly rehearse the same complaints that seem to dominate nearly every “expat” conversation and Facebook group.

Increasingly, I think this might why some people thrive abroad while others struggle.

Because one person allows the experience to change their perspective while the other spends all their energy defending and projecting the perspective they crossed the border with.

Moving abroad with full commitment simply tests whether you actually know yourself as well as you thought you did.

In my case, Spain didn’t change who I was.

It has helped confirm that I knew who I was all along.

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Right now, that evidence comes in the flavor of European soccer fans posting videos about how big everything is in the United States and how nice the people are.

Every few years, Americans rediscover that some foreigners think some things about America are pretty cool—or, at least, that they stand out—and proceed to act as if they’ve disproven the last hundred years of public policy, urban planning, healthcare research, and quality-of-life data and lived experience.

We’re in one of those moments again.

A handful of European fútbol fans have descended on the United States for the World Cup and, right on cue, social media has filled with videos of people marveling at things Europeans have been marveling at in America for generations:

• Americans are friendly.

• The portions are huge.

• The stores are enormous.

• The roads are wide.

• The houses are big.

• Everything feels bigger.

There's also an obvious self-selection effect at work here that nobody seems interested in acknowledging. The Europeans flying to the United States for the World Cup aren't a representative sample of Europe. They're a self-selected group of affluent sports fans who chose to spend thousands of euros and days, maybe even weeks of their lives traveling to America to watch soccer. A German guy who spends €6,000 to fly to Texas and post TikToks about giant supermarkets isn't exactly a random sample of European public opinion.

Anyway—

None of this is new.

Some Europeans have been saying some version of these things for decades. One of the biggest European stereotypes of Americans is that we’re excessively nice. You pass by a person on the street and they say hello. Americans can be overly nice in hospitality and other customer service settings. Much of this is performative, some of it is genuine. But it’s not something Europeans just discovered during the World Cup.

Likewise, Europeans have always been fascinated by the scale of the United States. It’s not merely the scale itself—it’s that so much is out-of-scale. See Las Vegas or your prototypical suburban environment for examples. Just because buildings and roads and such are big—and out-of-scale—in the US doesn’t mean the country does things bigger (it doesn’t) and gets high scores on quality of life.

What’s wild isn’t that European tourists are impressed by aspects of the United States.

It’s that so many Americans have interpreted these observations as a decisive rebuttal to anyone who questions America’s quality of life.

I recently received several comments on one of my Medium articles that perfectly captures this mindset.

Here’s a representative example:

“Just listen to what European soccer fans are saying about America.... They are fascinated about our quality of life. As a young man I joined the Navy and saw many different parts of the world, mostly Europe. I can tell you from my experience that America—despite its faults—is the best country on the planet. Bar none. Even Bill Mahr agrees. Again—listen to what World Cup fans are saying.... I’ll wait.”

I’ll wait while you pick up your mic.

Videos of Europeans at the World Cup aren’t evidence that the United States has won a quality-of-life argument. In fact, the American reaction to these videos—and the political right’s predictable tendency to amplify them—is further proof that Americans have zero idea what quality of life is to begin with.

The air conditioning discourse unfolding alongside the World Cup might be the perfect example of what I’m talking about. Europe is engaged in a legitimate debate—that alone makes it distinct from the United States—about climate adaptation, urban design, energy use, public health, and how societies should respond to increasingly extreme heat. And many Americans have reduced the conversation to: “Gotcha! Europeans finally admit America was right because air conditioning is good.”

Of course, air conditioning can be good. We have an AC unit in our apartment in Valencia. We’ve never turned it on. Same with the four heaters strategically located throughout our place.

Granted, we live near the sea, benefit from the frequent breeze it delivers, aren’t part of an at-risk population, and have adapted to slight summer discomfort that many Americans have been conditioned to view as unacceptable.

For the record, in my 30-plus year career of living away from my parents, I can count on one hand both the number of times I’ve had air conditioning and the number of times I’ve used it when available. So this isn’t some behavioral shift Europe deserves credit for.

None of this means air conditioning is bad or unnecessary. It means that people and societies make tradeoffs and sometimes choose to employ artificial tools to prevent death among the vulnerable, not to ensure that you’re “comfortable.”

Air conditioning also comes with costs: visual blight, energy consumption, and a meaningful contribution to the very climate conditions that make it appear—at least to one of the world’s largest contributors to climate change—increasingly necessary.

The American impulse to interpret every difference as proof of American exceptionalism is precisely the sort of thinking that prevents the country from ever seriously examining its own shortcomings. Continuing to protect and project the myth of American exceptionalism might be the clearest sign that the nation is in more trouble than ever.

I see a subset of a country so invested in the idea of its own superiority that it mistakes curiosity for envy, comfort for quality of life, and tourism for validation.

And that’s where the real tragedy begins.

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This is a problem you run into a lot when trying to discuss quality of life and—breaking it down to an area where I like to land—urban planning. As with political discussions, many Americans enter the conversation without even a basic understanding of the issues.

So the tragedy isn’t so much that some Americans think European soccer fans are proving America is the greatest country on Earth. It’s that this reaction reveals how many Americans don't even understand what question is being asked.

Nobody—especially in Europe—has ever argued that the United States doesn’t have nice people, large houses, giant stores, spectacular landscapes, economic opportunity, and global cultural influence.

What makes all of this especially frustrating—and honestly heartbreaking—is that for every person ill-equipped to even have the conversation to begin with, the United States has just as many, if not more, intelligent people who have been coming with innovative ideas or workable solutions to the country’s quality-of-life problem.

The US has produced, just to name a few:

• Jane Jacobs

• Lewis Mumford

• William H. Whyte

• Mike Davis

• Donald Shoup

• Bruce fucking Springsteen!

• Smart Cities movement

• Vision Zero advocates

• urban planners

• public health researchers

• housing scholars

• public space advocates

For generations.

These people have spent decades explaining:

• why car dependency damages quality of life

• why public space matters

• why mixed-use neighborhoods work

• why walkability matters

• why public transportation matters

• why social isolation matters

• why excessive consumption doesn’t create happiness

• why healthcare insecurity destroys well-being

The ideas, the evidence, and the examples exist to create the conditions for a high quality of life that isn't measured primarily by individual status. It’s just that many—and, let’s face it on this point, a majority of—Americans often reject solutions because accepting them would require admitting that the current system isn't optimal.

It’s not as if the established Democratic left in the United States has ever rejected suburbia and the idea of the American dream—they’ve only helped to proliferate the lunacy of both. They’ve given the Republican right and the far right a clear pathway to take righteous policy efforts and inaccurately categorize them as threats to a largely clueless American public.

• Walkable cities become “socialism.”

• Public transit becomes “anti-car.”

• Universal healthcare becomes “communism.”

• Urban density becomes “anti-family.”

• Cycling infrastructure becomes “war on cars.”

• Public investment becomes government overreach.

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For decades, much of the United States—from top to bottom—has chosen to preserve a mythical vision of itself rather than seriously reconsider whether that vision still serves the people living inside it.

It’s the only trickle-down scheme in America that has actually worked—the top-down refusal to acknowledge that the system is broken.

George H. W. Bush declared during the Gulf War that “the American way of life is not negotiable”—a statement that captured something much deeper about the country. The assumption that US systems, its built environment, its priorities, and its understanding of what constitutes a good life are fundamentally correct and therefore beyond meaningful critique.

Today, millions of Americans watch European tourists marvel at giant stores and friendly strangers and interpret these observations as validation of that assumption.

That’s what makes me sad as an American.

The United States has never lacked the people, the ideas, the evidence, or the imagination necessary to build a society with a much higher quality of life.

It simply chose, over and over again, not to.

This is precisely why so many Americans who leave eventually discover something that feels almost shocking:

That many of the problems they spent decades accepting as normal were never inevitable in the first place.

Happy Fourth of July.

But it’s not a joke. And I’m not crazy.

Large swaths of Americans think like this.

Then, without the self-awareness to keep these thoughts to themselves, they say them out loud—reinforcing not only my birth country’s reputation, but its position and place in the world.

It’s almost hard to believe.

But it goes a long way to putting the conversations we’ve been having in this newsletter lately in perspective. And it makes me realize that they’re not all part of some mania unfolding in my head.

Sometimes I see things and I can’t stop thinking about them. Then I’m left wondering why others don’t seem to care as much as I do. This personality quirk (?) probably goes a long way to explaining why I do what I do for a living.

Sometimes it’s torture—thinking alongside existing.

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We have to pick this comment apart.

The reality is that having money—not necessarily a lot of it, but enough to comfortably meet your day-to-day needs—puts you in a better position no matter where you live. This is how most modern societies function—for better or worse. This variable is related to, but still distinct from quality of life.

Many Americans would look at that paragraph and call bullshit. They would argue that having the money to buy a 5,000 square-foot home in a subdivision 40 miles outside of the dense and dirty city equals high quality of life.

That’s little more than a status play—not an expression of quality of life.

Money and quality of life aren’t the same variable.

One of the strangest things about living outside the United States is realizing that large numbers of Americans appear to believe they are.

The predominant American equation—that’s tough to shake after decades of indoctrination—is that:

Money → Status → Quality of Life

It’s as if the American dream is the end all and be all, even though it doesn’t even begin to address—

• How much time do you spend in a car?

• How much money does it cost to exist?

• Can you walk?

• Can you access public space?

• Do you interact with people?

• How much friction exists in daily life?

• How safe do you feel?

• How healthy is the food?

• How much time belongs to you?

None of these variables appear on a balance sheet. They’re not part of the psychology of the American dream and—subsequently—the American experience.

We all know that the American dream is bullshit. So to transplant it to—for example—Spain in your mind or in practice is also bullshit of the highest, but most basic order.

Why would you want to? Why would you need to?

But that comment does. And it’s representative of how quite a few people in the United States—and around the world—think. The idea that money cements status and the combination of money and status equals living the dream amid a high quality of life.

It’s such thoughtless nonsense.

My wife and I didn’t move to Spain because we got rich.

We moved because we wanted to improve day-to-day life in other areas, directly related to quality of life.

Our housing cost—rent and utilities—is about 24% higher in Spain than it was in Los Angeles. That’s because of three factors: we were under rent control in LA, we didn’t pay utilities, and housing prices in Valencia skyrocketed after we decided to move here. Rent that we anticipated being closer to €1.000 is actually €1.500.

While we save in other areas of life—e.g., transportation and food—we spend the same way and pretty much the same amount in Valencia as we did in Los Angeles. We didn’t move here to optimize our balance sheet in the day-to-day.

Many Americans would have seen that writing on the wall and bailed on Valencia—maybe on Spain altogether. Large swaths of people avoid Spain because of the taxes. For the record, as a self-employed person, they end up being about the same as they are in the U.S. The fact that this scares people away just blows my mind.

Is your heart a calculator?

Or does it want what it wants?

We moved from a position of relative strength amid a low quality of life to change the core structure of the aspects of our daily life that are effectively impossible to change in the United States.

And that’s the part comments like the one that anchors this article miss.

Of course money matters.

Money allows us to live in Russafa rather than somewhere else. Money gives you options. It improves quality of life almost everywhere on Earth. But having enough money to exercise choice isn't the same thing as being wealthy.

And money isn’t the same thing as quality of life.

The real question is what your money buys you.

In the United States, increasing your quality of life often means buying your way out of problems created by the surrounding environment: buying a larger home because public space is inadequate, buying a car because you can’t walk, buying private experiences because public life is weak, buying convenience because daily life contains so much friction.

In places with a stronger public realm, money still matters. But you’re no longer spending so much of it compensating for structural deficiencies.

That’s the distinction.

The quality of our lives improved in Spain not because we became richer, but because we stopped thinking about how to solve so many problems—sometimes with money—that we had simply accepted as normal in the United States.

And the strangest part is that many Americans don’t even recognize those problems as problems.

They think that’s what pursuing the dream is supposed to feel like.

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An image from the plaza over the weekend and my thoughts posted the same day on Substack Notes.

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The more I think about it, the better I can articulate why the scene I captured bothers me and why—actually—it says more about “them” that it does me.

This isn’t an anti-British tourism rant—though there’s plenty of room for another.

Spaniards have been complaining about British tourism for decades. I’m not breaking any new ground.

And do I even have to qualify it?

We’re not talking about all Brits. Just the ones who act like entitled overgrown children when they visit another country. And—who knows—maybe at home as well?

They seem to operate under the assumption that a place exists primarily for their consumption rather than their participation. They treat Spain like a frat house with cheap beer, sunshine, and an endless tolerance for their bull shit.

That image—and this whole thing—goes a long way to explaining why some people build a life abroad while others never really leave home, even if they physically make a move.

To tourists like this, Spain is little more than a service provider. It’s like visiting the car wash. Pull in, get hosed down, and go back home.

But Spain is a place with its own norms, rhythms, and expectations.

For tourists of this ilk, however, the language barrier is less an obstacle and more an annoyance. The culture is little more than an obligatory sideshow between irritating bellows of “la cuenta” or “cerveza”—two words that many Brits who have moved to Spain proudly proclaim represent the only Spanish they know.

The risk is that the more they visit, the more they like it and decide to move here. Same can probably be said of other sunny places where “expats” settle—from Mexico to Costa Rica. And we can cross out risk—what was once an eventuality has become a reality.

Because—as the YouTube video at the end of this article shows—Spain has more than a few enclaves where the British have effectively taken over.

Ultimately, British tourism to Spain and the eventual migration by some Brits is merely a lens into the broad dynamic.

Some people physically move abroad without ever mentally emigrating.

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It’s next to impossible to avoid this framing as you prepare to move abroad.

Spain—and our Valencia neighborhood in particular—presents with everything we want in a place to live. All the urban infrastructure and amenities, easily connected to loads of other cities with the same or similar.

So the narrative naturally becomes: Spain is going to crush in areas where the United States falls pathetically short.

Day-to-day life will be easier. Quality of life will be materially better—superior really.

In many ways, this is true. However, it’s only where the story begins. Ultimately, this line of thinking belongs in the dustbin because it’s a surface scratch you can use as a crutch when you find yourself up against the real struggles of building a life abroad.

The crutch of blaming every feeling you have, obstacle you face, or thing that goes wrong on the honeymoon period being over. It’s as if Spain—suddenly—stopped being easier and better when you struggle to deal with life.

World revolve around you much?

So—basic.

Despite all the relocation porn, life is still life.

A strong day-to-day can only exist within a broader psychological framework influenced, but not dictated by place. In other words, the place can only do its job after you do yours.

So, the basic narrative of I’m going to move to Spain and because Spain has X, Y, and Z, life will instantly and always be better than it was in the United States—or wherever—is where quite a few people lose their way and react without aim, leading to a terrible experience abroad, a move back home, or both.

Spain has been—for all intents and purposes—easy for me, but the more I think about it, it’s less because of Spain and more because I’ve done the work. I have adapted in many ways. I’m learning the language, speaking as freely as I can in each moment, and getting better every day. I’ve not only accepted the never-ending feeling of being a little uncomfortable or out of place, but embraced it as a concrete sign of personal growth. I compare Spain less to where I came from.

I wholly and completely consider Spain home. It’s where my wife and I do life.

But there’s one important element I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

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I'm still not sure I understand why Valencia vs Barcelona? I like Valencia as the "baby Barcelona", and it's a more reasonable cost of living, but I find it to be a bit sleepy.

The answer I gave when that comment was made in 2024 still stands today:

It’s only “Valencia vs Barcelona” because those are the two places we’re considering.

It doesn’t feel sleepy to me. It’s just different. It would be like calling San Francisco sleepy relative to New York City, something I’m sure many New Yorkers would inaccurately say. Two different places, each with their own vibrancy.

Definitely not pitting one against the other. I like them both. SF and NYC. Valencia and Barcelona.

That exchange gets right to the heart of so much we’ve been discussing lately.

So let’s try to pick it apart and generate some adaptable conclusions.

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Quantify it all you want, the answer comes down to life.

Of course, visas, money, and all sorts of objective issues raise their hands and rear their ugly heads to make a move home necessary—or more likely to happen. But, often, it seems that reasons like this are little more than excuses. They’re window dressing to hide what some people seem to view as failure.

Looking at it on the front end, mountains of people said they were thinking or even planning to move when we told our friends and family what we were going to do nearly four years ago. To a person, every single one of them remains in the United States.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with this. Which makes it even more curious—why do people, particularly in the United States, feel the need to present themselves on the move abroad bandwagon?

Looking at it on the back end, handfuls of people who make the move and go back did so for no specific reason other than life.

Life happens no matter where you live. When I lose a client or see reduced income in Spain—as I have once or twice during our year-and-a-half here—it’s no different than when it happened in Los Angeles, as early as late 2024, just months before we were set to move.

It all comes back to the words I emphasized: home and expat.

My educated guess—based on my own experience and empirical observations—is that people who treat life happening in a foreign country differently than they would treat life happening where they’re from are:

• Expats effectively passing through a new country, who

• never really considered their new country home.

Where they came from remained their safety net, their nurturing bosom—it never stopped being home.

The longer I live in Spain, the more I think that’s the distinction.

Not between success and failure.

Not even between people who stay and people who leave and the reasons they jot down on the exit survey.

The distinction is whether home changes.

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At pretty much the moment my wife and I decided to do it—roughly four-and-a-half years ago—I was all-in. When we decided on Valencia—about three-and-a-half years ago—I doubled down emotionally and logistically.

As I noted over the weekend, what I wrote leading up to the move matches with how I’m feeling today, nearly a year-and-a-half into life in Spain.

Living in Europe is everything we thought it would be—and more. Particularly in the day-to-day from a quality-of-life standpoint.

That said, I’ve been having a recurring thought lately.

It’s not uncertainty or homesickness. It’s certainly not regret. It’s something strange—even a little scary.

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We moved in January 2025. So we’ve been in Valencia for nearly a year and a half.

Wild.

In November 2024, I wrote about what I might miss about Los Angeles.

I branded the whole idea of missing things as pretty much a bullshit concept.

To get there, I compared two definitions central to the discussion:

When you miss, you —

When you feel nostalgia, you —

So there’s a distinction that’s easy to lose sight of.

All day long, I’m constantly looking at the dictionary definitions of words we often don’t think twice about using.

In my line of work, I think it’s important.

Because when you lose sight of the distinction between—as one example—miss and nostalgia you fall into a trap that effectively drags discourse into a shallow abyss. In everything from politics to the incessant dialogue around moving abroad, people throw words around absent much, if any consideration of their meaning.

That’s part of why we end up with these basic if/then discussions about moving away from something versus moving towards something or fantastical “scouting trip” searches for some mythical place that replicates what makes you comfortable without tradeoffs. It’s the type of drivel you get from AI if you don’t know how to use it.

With the distinct meanings of miss and nostalgia (or whatever) established, you’re better equipped to have a conversation that goes beyond the empty desire to get views on YouTube or scare someone into paying for your masterclass or relocation course.

In the 2024 article, I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t miss LA, but I’d feel nostalgia for the city and the state of California that basically turned me into the person I am today:

But I will certainly feel nostalgia — a true appreciation — about living in a state where you have experiences you simply can’t have in other places. Experiences that become so part of your daily life that you can take them for granted.

But you don’t. Because, in a part of the world where an earthquake can strike at any second and where the only constant is change (even if the more things change, the more they stay the same!), you learn to not take things for granted.

I don’t take for granted the fact that my preferred mode of ride sharing has quickly become Waymo’s driverless cars.

Until they arrive in Spain — and they will — I won’t miss, but I will feel nostalgic about driverless cars…

My love of cities sparked several years of urban planning education, which focused on the physical and mental health and social components of urban living.

Those two factors have convinced me that I can take an already good life and make it better in an environment with a culture that revolves around public space and subsequent social interaction and is much, much less about the car. Car culture is one thing I won’t miss — or even feel nostalgia for — after I leave California.

I consider myself an expert in knowing the types of physical environments where I thrive.

So, at a point when I could bask in the glow of having made it in California for more than half of my life, I prefer to take what I learned here and use it to learn a new language, overcome fresh and foreign obstacles and make sense of another culture that has the potential to continue to shape who I am and want to be.

Waymo driverless cars will likely be in Madrid soon. They’re about to hit London.

Do I feel a crazy rush to use them? Not at all.

Because the existence of driverless cars in a handful of US cities is the type of thing that fuels America’s inferiority complex. The US propaganda machine loves to take isolated “advances”—self-driving cars or AI—and hold them up as examples of US innovation and subsequent superiority.

We do the same thing in our personal lives. We fixate on isolated experiences—a favorite bar, a restaurant, a driverless car ride—and give them far more weight than they deserve when evaluating the overall quality of a place or a life

It’s only after you live in another place long enough that you realize technological innovation isn’t a spectacle like SpaceX, it’s actual convenience readily visible in day-to-day life. Like putting your card down on the table to pay in the US rather than—as they’ve been doing in Canada and Europe at least since I was in my late-twenties—tapping a reader that a server brings to your table.

The list could go on, but—take it from me and the endless videos on YouTube—other parts of the world show the United States for what it is: way behind on implementing the technology that could actually make everyday tasks more convenient and improve quality of life for the population. Card readers, high-speed trains—or, just trains, real food at local markets, grocery store amenities, public space, and so on and so forth.

There’s an arc that weaves itself through this conversation.

For example,

Read those after you finish reading this.

Anyway, back to missing things.

One of the places I miss most is a dive bar in Los Angeles called the Frolic Room.

If you've never been there, it's dark, a little grimy, completely unpretentious, and exactly the type of place that’s impossible to explain to somebody who hasn't spent time there. Troy always poured me too much Fernet alongside a cold beer, usually seconds after I walked through the door more than a little stoned from my Waymo ride.

I don’t miss it because it’s objectively better than anything in Valencia.

It isn’t.

I miss it because it belonged to a specific period of my life.

That’s where people often get confused. They mistake nostalgia for evidence. They think missing something means they made the wrong decision.

It doesn’t.

It usually means that a place, a person, or a routine mattered.

The mistake is assuming that because something mattered, you should go back to it. But if you actually open the encyclopedia in your brain, you realize that experiences like drinking in a dive bar are moments in time and—often—forms of escape.

It’s easy to gloss over the fact that I started taking Waymos from our apartment to the Frolic Room because the walk was so dirty, sketchy, and even dangerous. Not being able to walk out your front door and take a 1.3-mile journey on foot and actually feel safe—that’s the type of stuff that matters and persists. And ties back to the discussion from the other day that quality of life is infrastructure, not €3 beers or beach days.

If I moved back to Los Angeles tomorrow, the Frolic Room would still be there.

The problem is that everything else would be there too.

The traffic. The cost of living. The constant feeling that ordinary life requires more effort than it should. And the tradeoffs that caused me to leave in the first place.

That’s what nostalgia conveniently edits out.

It gives you a sizzle reel. But the difference between a good and ordinary life isn’t highlights. It’s the choices you make to structure the many minutes that fill your day-to-day.

I love nostalgia—a lot actually—but it conveniently edits the stories we tell ourselves. In some cases, the resulting psychological mindfuck can lead to bad decisions—or to seeking advice in the middle of a decision from grifters and opportunists who prey on your uncertainty rather than make a genuine effort to explain it.

Nostalgia loves…

The Fernet.

The bartender.

The familiar faces.

The feeling.

But it doesn’t bring you forward in your thinking or in your experience of life.

Many people who move abroad—present company included—do it to learn, to grow, to evolve, to challenge themselves at points in their lives when comfort and the status quo can lead to stagnation. When the challenge appears, it’s easier to mentally fall back on and crave what you know. This is merely a reality of life—with relocating to a different country but one case study. We have a tendency to remember the good parts, but conveniently omit the not-so-good ones.

The part where I was taking a driverless car 1.3 miles because the walk between my apartment and one of my favorite places in the city felt unpleasant enough that I didn’t want to do it.

The part where I accepted things as normal that I no longer consider normal.

The part where daily life required more planning, more money, more effort, and more tolerance for dysfunction than it does now.

That’s the distinction.

I don’t miss Los Angeles.

I feel nostalgia for parts of Los Angeles.

Just like I feel nostalgia for parts of San Francisco.

Just like one day I’ll probably feel nostalgia for parts of Valencia.

If you’re building an interesting life, you’ll leave things behind.

Places.

Routines.

Bars.

Restaurants.

Entire versions of yourself.

That’s the story I’ve been writing for myself since I was 13.

If you never experience feeling nostalgia for any of those things, there’s a decent chance you’ve held yourself back from going anywhere worth going in the first place.

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That should probably replace “In God We Trust” on the currency.

The biggest danger Trump might present isn’t his pathetic nature and actions themselves, but the scapegoat he provides for the American people. His delusion and destruction have planted the not-so-subtle seed that—once he’s gone—somebody else will come along and save the country. The sad reality is that the country was broken long before Trump’s narcissism and infantilism took control. He’s opportunistically pouring salt in the long-open wound of a failing experiment.

Trump no longer window dresses what the United States of America is and has long forced its people to become—a nation of individualists. A classic brainwashing tactic of the American establishment is to place an adjective such as rugged in front of individualists to make it sound somehow righteous. Just like when they describe the working class from places like Chicago and Buffalo as “proud” or “tough as nails.”

You’re placed into this every man, woman, and child for themselves society and systematically beaten down at every turn, but you’re rugged, proud, and tough through it all. At least you have something—and, with it, you can overcome any challenge and be whoever and whatever you want to be.

That’s the runaway American dream.

Long-time readers recall how I have characterized the so-called retirement crisis in the United States.

If you’re forced to work in retirement, you’re destined to stock shelves in a grocery store.

Not that there’s anything wrong with stocking shelves in a grocery store. But it just comes down to having choice in the matter.

You have a better shot at having choice in the matter, the sooner you acknowledge and embrace the reality that you’ll Never Retire and, subsequently, start planning for it.

However, the retirement establishment offers scant helpful advice—let alone realistic, concrete solutions—to deal with the issue.

The government routinely changes rules around tax-deferred retirement accounts.

Not helpful for large swaths of people who haven’t saved enough.

The financial media and retirement planners default to save more.

Not helpful for people with income, cost of living, and other objective or self-inflicted constraints.

Instead, all of the above look at the person with $50,000, $100,000 or much, much less saved—nowhere near that traditional retirement magic number of $1 million—and imply, or at least suggest, that the individual did something wrong

You’re to blame. You’re deficient. You’re less than. You made a mistake.

Blows my mind how our society tends to take clearly collective problems—not just around retirement and saving money—and frame them as individual failures.

The retirement crisis is nothing more than one clean example to pull from a dirty mess.

Millions of people arrived at middle age or retirement age with nowhere near enough money saved. The response from the retirement industry wasn’t to ask whether the system itself was broken. It was to ask what these individuals did wrong.

Did they start early enough?

Did they buy too much coffee?

The possibility that housing costs exploded, pensions disappeared, healthcare became unaffordable, wages stagnated, and entire generations were forced to navigate a fundamentally different economic reality barely enters the discussion.

The system never gets scrutinized. The individual always does.

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The United States has effectively brainwashed its people—that would be an overstated cliché if it weren’t true.

Between 1999 and 2006 in San Francisco, I learned this quickly while doubling as an urban planning student and an activist fighting against chain stores, for bicycles, and against war.

Historically, the United States has taken what should be an unacceptable baseline—and is an unacceptable baseline in other parts of the world—and led people who crave change to believe they’re fighting the good fight. Activists were simply dangled carrots in the form of here-and-there, once-in-a-while incremental change.

But that baseline has shifted even further as the country recently took what is—in practice—a complete right turn.

Now, in the US, you’re even more conditioned to accept the unacceptable, discover you’re disenchanted with it, and then feel righteous for offering a little bit of resistance.

It’s like eating a salad topped with gasoline, then celebrating when—one day—the powers that be decide they’re going to let you use olive oil.

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Quality of life gets presented to us as Americans similarly.

With a sole focus on GDP, productivity, and the myth of superior convenience and innovation relative to other parts of the world—packaged in what, as it turns out, is just one big inferiority complex—you’re sold a warped idea of what quality of life actually is in practice.

The problem is that quality of life is difficult to measure when you’ve never experienced anything else.

You normalize whatever surrounds you—driving everywhere, sitting in traffic, spending a quarter of your income on a car.

You normalize enormous parking lots and hostility in public (people are just stressed).

Eventually, you stop seeing these things as choices.

They become the reality itself—your reality.

That’s the trick.

The most effective systems don’t merely force compliance. They convince people there is no alternative—and that any alternative goes against their superior way of life.

It’s a mindfuck of the highest order.

That’s why quality of life is such a difficult topic for Americans to discuss.

Most people hear “quality of life” and think it’s some vague lifestyle concept involving beaches, wine, and vacation days.

It’s not.

Quality of life is infrastructure.

It’s geography, transportation, housing, and public space.

It’s how difficult ordinary life feels on an average Tuesday.

Let’s be clear, other parts of the world struggle with some of the same issues. I’m seeing it in Spain where housing sits at the center of many quality-of-life debates. But—as we discussed in reference to gentrification the other day—certain pressures seem inevitable in any capitalist system.

The difference isn’t that Europe somehow solved these problems.

The difference is where the argument starts.

In Spain, people are fighting over housing in cities where large numbers of residents already walk, bike, use public transportation, spend time in public space, and live without needing a car.

In the United States, many people are fighting for those things before they can even begin having the housing conversation.

The baseline is different.

Not perfect. Different.

And that difference matters because quality of life is cumulative. It isn’t one thing. It’s a collection of hundreds of small things that either make ordinary life easier or harder.

There’s a massive difference between having to drive everywhere and deciding whether today is a day to drive, take the train, ride your bike, or walk.

That’s where the quality of life conversations go awry.

Quality of life isn’t beaches or even vacation days.

It’s not some romantic vision of Europe.

It’s whether ordinary life feels unnecessarily difficult.

It’s whether your environment works with you or against you.

It comes down to having options—to having choice. As you can see in real time in Spain, as choices decrease for a meaningful number of people, quality of life decreases for a meaningful number of people. This creates an enormous responsibility for the collective that’s difficult—if not impossible—to fully get your head around.

But, at the baseline with all else equal in a discussion where all else is never equal, the hardest part is that you often don’t realize what’s missing until you’ve experienced something else.

As Americans, we have little to no concept of quality of life until we move—not go on vacation, but live someplace else for long enough. I can tell you this with full confidence after having been through the process over my—almost—51 years on this planet.

For most of us, defining quality of life is like asking a fish to describe water.

We grew up inside the system, so we assume it’s normal.

Only when you step outside it do you realize how many things you always thought were unavoidable were actually all about choices your leaders made for you and choices you never had.

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And I’ve come to a somewhat sad conclusion—it’s inevitable and it’s all relative.

When my daughter was about to be born in 2003, we moved into what was the gentrifying Mission District in San Francisco. We wanted to live there because it made sense logistically and as a neighborhood where you can access most of what you need without a car.

We rented a basement flat in a three-unit building for $1,875 a month.

We didn’t rent—say—a top-floor unit that would have gone for closer to $3,500 at the time.

We rented what was comfortably affordable.

Looking at the numbers today, the apartment we rented 23 years ago now goes for $3,649.

Increíble. The upper flats—based on my analysis—would go for between $4,800 to $6,000 a month.

I have been largely priced out of San Francisco’s Mission District.

Fast forward to 2018 and I moved to East Hollywood in Los Angeles—at the beginning of its still-evolving gentrification process.

Why? Because it was faster and cheaper to find something in my price range: A studio apartment for $1,300 a month. The same in West Hollywood would’ve been closer to work, but would have been more difficult to find and likely closer to $2,000.

Interestingly, that unit hasn’t increased that much in price. It’s now listed at $1,345. In fact, I think, after a rent increase or two, I was paying $1,345.

Whatever—the point is I made a choice based on several factors, including what I felt comfortable paying.

I’m not priced out of East Hollywood yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens someday.

Fast forward to 2025 and Valencia, Spain.

We made our decision to move to Valencia in 2023. Between the time of our decision and the move, rents increased by about 10.5%. Since we secured our long-term rental in February of 2025, they’ve increased a bit more, though it’s difficult to estimate by exactly how much.

We pay €1.500 for a two-bedroom in the heart of the neighborhood. Interestingly, we pay more than we did in Los Angeles where—thanks to strong rent control—our rent was $1,484 a month. Factor in the currency exchange and our rent in Valencia is $1,745.

We’re an odd case—we pay more for housing in Spain than we did in LA. For context—without rent control, market rate for that Los Angeles apartment would likely be around $3,000. An apartment that my wife rented before my time for nothing because it needed work in a central part of relatively tony LA.

She was making strategic choices about how to place herself in the best housing and geographic position possible at the same time as I was. And isn’t that what we all do—if we’re not made of money?

In a minute—a story that leads to the larger point.

But first…

I look back on and look at San Francisco now and it’s comical just how typical it really is when you consider it within the context of gentrification.

After my kid was born—in late 2003—we’d proceed down the hill on 21st Street toward Valencia (one of the main drags in The Mission is called Valencia) every single day. Me pushing the stroller.

One of the first times we did, this local eccentric—this was back when each neighborhood had a homeless person and an eccentric person or two, not as it is now with the city overrun by both. It used to be easy to determine who was who. You knew them by name and would often stop for a chat. Those days are long gone.

Anyway—

This guy—with long crazy hair who busked on the corner with an acoustic guitar—looked at my newborn and said, “Welcome to Earth, kid. Now let the pain begin.”

I just love telling that story, but I guess it pertains to the discussion—at least adjacently.

We’d turn the corner and—starting in May 2005—we became one of the first customers at a café called Ritual Coffee Roasters. It was a small place with friendly employees who liked to say hi to my daughter—and, to some extent, me. Now, Ritual is a staple in San Francisco—and it’s absurdly expensive.

This picture of the menu is from the Hayes Valley location in May 2025—

—I was paying about $3 for a cappuccino in 2005.

Ritual massively expanded that original Mission location. Now it basically looks like a fucking computer lab with tech people typing away. I think khakis and fleece hoodies have become the new dress code, though a few people behind the counter and Gen X guests with tattoos still remain.

Ritual is emblematic—a good symbolic foil—of the gentrification process we see around the world.

I wanted to ensure I wasn’t misremembering or romanticizing the past so I asked Google’s Gemini to check some things for me.

Here’s a summary of what it said:

Ritual Coffee Roasters first opened in May 2005 at 1026 Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Current Locations (4 Total)

After some recent closures (Haight Street closed in April 2025 and the Flora Grubb kiosk also closed), Ritual currently operates four established cafes, with a fifth location in the Financial District reportedly in the works as of early 2026.The Mission (Original): 1026 Valencia Street

Is it part of the gentrification process?

Yes, Ritual is frequently cited as a symbol of gentrification in the Mission.
Because it opened in 2005—just before the tech boom accelerated heavily—it is often viewed as a “pioneer” of the gentrification wave that transformed the neighborhood.

“The Smell of Gentrification”: Local commentary has explicitly described the sensory shift in the Mission from “Mexican food” to “coffee and chai” as a marker of displacement, with Ritual’s arrival on Valencia Street being a key turning point.

Yes, the prices on that board represent the historical standard, but they have experienced a slight bump since then.

Here is exactly how the prices compare to what you would have paid at the original Mission District counter two decades ago:

1. Are the prices higher now?

Yes, but only slightly for standard drinks. Current menu pricing shows that most locations have adjusted upwards by about $0.25 to $0.50 on core milk-and-espresso beverages.

Cappuccino: Costs $6.25 - $6.50 (Up from $6.00 in May 2025)

Latte: Costs $7.25 - $7.50 (Up from $7.00 in May 2025)

2. What were you paying in 2005?

When Ritual first launched in May 2005 on Valencia Street, coffee prices were a stark contrast to today. You would have been paying roughly $2.75 for a cappuccino and $3.25 for a latte.

The deeper story here is that nearly every gentrifying neighborhood follows the same pattern. And you can’t stop it, you can only hope to contain it.

But it’s not the people’s job to deal with gentrification.

It’s not the job of the people at risk of being priced out—many of whom turn to activism, and understandably so.

It’s not the job of people making choices about where to live that work for them.

It’s not the job of landlords making rational and reasonable (as in, not skirting the rules to take long-term rentals off of the market) decisions in their own interest.

It’s not the job of commercial enterprises.

We have a place we go to a lot in our neighborhood here that’s creating a local mini-empire in Russafa—sort of like Ritual, but they’re moving beyond coffee. They do a nice job and keep their prices relatively normal, particularly on basic coffee drinks.

It’s the job of government.

But it’s a balancing act between macro-level economic prosperity and countless micro-level situations—some of which act in the aggregate.

Strong rent control is a must. So is housing construction at all price points. Regulation on national chains—especially American ones—is essential. I could go on, but it’s sort of pointless because we’ve been having the same conversation for decades.

Even in Spain—which as been far more progressive than even San Francisco—they’re not doing enough. I don’t want to say they can’t because—as Paris proved with cars—cities can do anything they want to do. It’s just easier to pay lip service, implement easy policy, and turn the other cheek.

At the micro level it all comes back to this—

Nobody moves somewhere thinking: “I’m here to participate in a long-term process of displacement.”

They move because they’re trying to improve their quality of life.

That’s what I was doing in San Francisco and East Hollywood.

That’s what my wife and I were doing when we chose Valencia.

And that’s what most people are doing—across the economic and ethnic spectrum.

We’re all born into situations. They change as we get older. Sometimes we will that change. At other times we have no impact whatsoever. It’s usually a mix of cards being dealt—and how.

Gentrification is less a story about individual people than it is a story about systems that governments either choose to manage or choose to ignore. The government’s job—or at least it should be—is to manage a society made up of all different types of people who have the same rights and many of the same—or, at least, similar—desires and aspirations.

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