It goes a long way to illustrating what I mean when I say I don’t believe in the honeymoon period in the way most of the world attaches it to moving abroad or doing other big things. I think many people accept the honeymoon period as fact because it’s an easy way for them to burst your bubble.

Well, you’re excited now, but that’s your emotion and excitement talking. Just wait until real life starts!

We’ve both been soberly assessing and anticipating every step of the process of making this move. Assessing the moments as we live them — after 19 months in Valencia — and anticipating what would come next and how it might feel.

For me, a constant has been a rejection of the typical way people frame the honeymoon period — which leads us to my thoughts from 2024:

I also feel like we have already lived the so-called honeymoon period and will hit the ground running (and living) right away in Spain…

Time has a way of creating certainty or leading you to realize that you really don’t want to do something as bad as you thought you did after all. Giving yourself time and space between making a decision you can still change and the point where you can’t or would have a harder time turning back is probably a good idea…

Time has mellowed out the excitement from post-vacation euphoria — which feels great so there’s no reason to suppress it — to something decidedly practical. To the notion that as much as we’re changing our lives, we’re really just enhancing — upgrading — our existing lifestyle and — subsequently — our quality of life.

Put another way, the more euphoria-like excitement came and went with the decision to move in the first place.

We didn’t move to experience a rush.

We moved to continue doing life in a place where we recognized the advantages immediately because we knew the environment we were leaving. Because that’s pretty much all we had to concretely compare it to — that and our accumulated knowledge of places, how they make us feel, and how we operated inside of them.

This is the critical part for anybody considering a move abroad or any other decision where people like to say the novelty will wear off. Such as retirement, starting a new job, or even — to reluctantly use another well-traveled phrase — following your passion.

Within the context of moving — 

You arrive. Really, you know very little. All you have are your recent reference points. For us that was the United States and, specifically, Los Angeles. Then as that reference point fades and you accumulate experience and time on the ground in your new place, you know more and build new baseline reference points. So you start to expect more from your environment, especially when you see and experience what exists in your environment relative to what you see happening elsewhere as part of your accumulation of new experiences.

So, for me, part of that is seeing what Barcelona and Paris have done from an urban planning perspective and comparing them to similar things Valencia has done — or stopped doing thanks to a political shift to the right.

If you subscribe to the conventional honeymoon narrative, you might interpret any criticism of Valencia as evidence that my original enthusiasm was naïve. But recognizing that this city has work to do doesn’t negate any of the reasons why I love living here.

Just because it’s better as a city from urban planning, quality of life, and other standpoints than what you’re likely to find throughout most of the United States doesn’t mean it’s without problems or progress to make.

As time creates more space between where you came from (LA) and where you are now (Valencia), and you have new and diverse experiences (day-to-day living, seeing other places for the first time or from fresh perspectives), your old reference point fades.

Somewhere around this juncture, I stopped comparing Valencia to Los Angeles and Spain to the United States as much as I used to. I changed my baseline because my field of vision and experience expanded.

So I “complain” about things here more now. That’s not the part of the honeymoon narrative I reject. The recalibration is real.

It’s a recalibration in which ‘better than the United States’ stops being a sufficient or helpful standard. When you see how things are done elsewhere in relation to where you came from, hopefully you evolve to expecting the place you live in now to meet its own possibilities. You don’t sit around the table with other “expats” bemoaning “bureaucracy,” complaining because the clerk didn’t speak English, or noting where you can find Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

Your life exists in your new setting.

You see Valencia’s incredible bicycle infrastructure. Then you see that progress stunted at the same time as you witness more great strides in Barcelona and Paris. Criticism becomes something you contribute as one type of insider, not commentary delivered from an outside perspective living in the past that has very little to do with the present.

You know you’re becoming part of a place when you stop treating its problems as local color and start caring whether they get fixed.

To me, this is integration.

It’s not the moment when everything feels completely familiar — because it still doesn’t. It’s the moment when you start to feel like you have a dog in the fight because you’re walking and riding your bike on these streets and sitting in these plazas and supporting these local businesses. And doing this life right here and right now.

When my wife read an early version of this, she told me I was basically describing the end of the honeymoon period while insisting I don’t believe in it.

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Except she was out of context.

Not in uniform, she was pushing a stroller with—presumably—her child inside.

We both did a double take and exchanged a quick greeting in passing.

I'm not about to create a story for this woman. I don't know where she lives or how she views her place in the community. I don't even know for sure if that was her kid.

But I can make the observation that it's pretty fucking cool to have your mail carrier acknowledge you when they’re not working. Little things like that combine to make a place feel like a neighborhood. And, because of the weak ties I've established in our neighborhood, I have this type of “relationship” with a couple dozen people—maybe more.

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It’s not as if people argue with you when you speak with them or criticize your decision. But there’s absolutely something happening beneath the surface in many of the conversations you have after moving abroad.

The questions stop. Not just about your new home, but about you — about things that would’ve invited follow-ups and check-ins if you were still living in the U.S.

Not everyone does this. And the ones who do don’t do it all at once.

Some people move on from you because that’s what people do — it’s expected. Friends become acquaintances. Acquaintances become people you used to know. Distance does what distance does.

This makes sense, but only to a certain extent.

Because, in my experience, having left home in 1995 — on the verge of 20 — I spent the next 30 years of my life living away from home. During this time, my relationship to family and friends changed in many ways, but — at its core — it largely stayed the same.

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Moving abroad appears to have changed everything

I’m an overthinker. So this might be an unfair example, but it keeps bothering me.

The other day, I mentioned to someone close to me that I hurt my back in an exercise class and was taking it easy for a few days. Normally, this would have triggered a follow-up call the next day. Instead, nothing — not even follow-up questions on the call where I mentioned my back.

It could be that they’re simply dealing with their own life, as all of us are. It could also be that they still measure proximity in miles even though we live in a world where actual physical distance matters less.

In their mind, because I’m farther away, I’m further away.

It’s a small thing. But it fits a pattern. When I call, the response almost feels like —oh, it’s you, calling from that life over there. The one who left, then left again.

When you don’t choose the life people expected for you, they don’t always know what to do with your experience.

I felt this type of thing long before I moved to Spain.

Working-class Gen X kids might get it.

The people around you rooted for your success. Your parents wanted you to do better than they did — which, as it turns out, was probably more like do exactly what they did.

What everybody really wanted for you was to go out into the world, then come back, and replicate their success by living the American dream in your hometown or within easy driving or flying distance.

They wanted a trophy to place safely on the mantle — a badge of honor and affirmation. They wanted you to go out into the world, but not so far that your life stopped validating theirs.

So it’s not merely the act of moving abroad. That’s the lens only because my wife and I moved to Spain nearly two years ago. Right now, it’s particularly relevant to my life and work.

For many of us who veered from the script, abroad might as well be California if you grew up in the South, Midwest, or Northeast.

Or pursuing an advanced degree. Or reading a book. Or eating sushi.

Anything that challenges the assumptions people inherited and the experiences they’re comfortable with because they’ve never had much reason to question them.

This is not some conscious thing. In fact, the subtlety is the point.

Although I heard close variations of this shortly after I left home as a young adult, nobody has to say, you think you’re better than us now. The feeling comes through when they stop asking what daily life is actually like.

At some point, to them, even ordinary details start to sound like criticism: that I don’t need a car because I walk or bike everywhere. That public life here actually exists — and happens naturally, day and night, without the same need to look over your shoulder. That so many things Americans treat as inevitable — daily hostility, isolation, low-quality food, dead streets, the exhaustion of getting anywhere — feel far less inevitable after you live somewhere else.

This isn’t bragging — it’s just the illustration of a new baseline, a new reality on quality of life that many Americans have trouble processing. Even the ones who “get it” — the ones who travel and think the United States needs to change — often discount what you’re saying as if you’re exaggerating. When they encounter what you’re relaying firsthand — on vacation — they often instinctively characterize it as “weird,” rather than different.

The general attitude feels something like: it’s great that you’re seeing the world and experiencing a different way of living — as long as you don’t come back with empirical conclusions.

I don’t feel especially wounded that some people don’t know what to do with the fact that my wife and I moved to another country.

I expected this — and even experienced it before we left.

A full life costs you things.

Proximity, familiarity, and the comfort of being easily understood might be the top three. But I’ve never been willing to trade a fuller life for geographic closeness, routine, and the same conversations forever.

I left because I wanted more life, not less.

And part of wanting more life is accepting that not everybody will be fully onboard, let alone curious.

That’s fine.

Getting the most out of the years I have on this planet was always going to require tradeoffs — sometimes uncomfortable ones.

If that sounds like criticism to some people, I can live with that.

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I think this helps explain a certain defensiveness among people who write about moving abroad.

Even as I sat down to write this, I felt a twinge of discomfort. Simply because I’m sharing my thoughts and feelings as they exist from moment to moment. But we’re all so worried about what others think—how they’ll perceive us—that we don’t express what’s happening as it’s happening.

Moving to another country—or doing similarly big things in life—contains an incredible amount of emotional complexity. I’m sure retirement does as well, particularly if you left a job you’d been at for a long period of time. You’re happy you left and you sure as hell don’t want to go back, but as you navigate your new life, you grieve the one you lost—at least a little.

Right there—again—I hesitated a second to even write that part.

That said—and this isn’t a qualification or a walk back—I have zero desire to return to the United States. In fact, I literally can’t even imagine it. I could see myself living elsewhere in Europe—maybe even some place else in the world—but the US isn’t on the list.

After experiencing our well-designed and unabashed urban neighborhood here in Valencia, anything but the equivalent or better would be a letdown. While you might find fewer cars and more bikes in places like Paris, from a day-to-day flow, public life and public space standpoint, it doesn’t get much better than the core of Russafa.

Bottom line—we like to think we have it all figured out, even if we say we don’t. This is part of why true emotional complexity rarely enters the move abroad conversation. And it’s also part of why move abroad content tends to get stuck in the how to do this and that and five things I miss, love, or hate mode and never leaves, leading to a sea of all of the same content with little variation.

Most people would rather be number 1,045 in line to tell you how to get the digital nomad visa or among the thousands who say they can’t find ranch dressing only to be told repeatedly in the comments section exactly where they can find it than talk about the stuff that matters and might actually help prepare other people for their move.

Maybe “rather” is the wrong word, but that’s where the vast majority of content creators get stuck—in the safe spaces—because any complexity at least can feel like it gets converted into a verdict.

That’s the part I’m interested in.

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But, after 49.5 years in the United States—the final 25 or so in California—I escaped.

At the time it mostly didn’t feel like escape. It felt like an upgrade on daily life that my wife and I were in the position—that we were lucky enough—to make.

After nearly two years in Spain, it still feels like an economy-to-premium cabin upgrade, but escape describes the move better now than it did before.

I’ve spent enough time living in Valencia and seeing other European cities to more completely understand just how much American cities lack on infrastructure, social policy, public space, proximity, convenience, vibrancy—which, taken together, is quality of life.

Even against this backdrop, I can’t shake a few key points about America.

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For several months, the bench in front of our apartment was not bolted into the ground. This had been the case since March when the falleros on our block unbolted it in preparation for Las Fallas celebration and never bolted it back in.

Sort of annoying, but ultimately no big deal.

Because the bench was in need of some love—and, in my opinion, needed to be replaced—I decided to do something I've never done before in my life (that I can recall): I sent a letter (via email, er, actually, an online form) to City Hall.

I'm actually sitting on the bench as I write this. It's not new, but it is bolted to the ground again with its arms and legs repainted. The city requested images by email the day after my complaint. Two or three weeks later, it acted.

In the past, I never would've complained. It was a mix of not wanting to be that person (I didn’t go into urban planning because of those people) and being conditioned in California to believe that the cities where I lived—San Francisco and LA—would’ve laughed at me as they ignored me. Whether or not that’s true should be left an open question. If I’m going to rail on people stereotyping places like Spain with little, if any experience, I probably shouldn’t do likewise in reverse.

That said—I know what I know.

Quality of life, particularly in Los Angeles, became so low during my tenure there that I didn’t have it in me to complain. In LA—and in other parts of the US—much of the disrepair and interpersonal public hostility reflects segments of society that have simply given up.

Toward the end of our run there, Los Angeles felt more every man, woman, and child for themselves than ever. Everything from people running red lights long after the signal change and thoughtlessly turning into crosswalks to trash all over the streets amid scant maintenance and crumbling infrastructure illustrated a top-to-bottom failure of government and society. It’s a wonder that the place still managed to not be the absolute hellhole the American right attempts to portray it as.

That’s the crazy thing about American cities these days—they’re bad, but they’re not nearly as bad as Fox News makes them out to be. It’s unfortunate that straddling the middle ground as I do seems to give the right more ammunition, but seldom results in actual change from people who might actually give a genuine damn about cities.

And that’s really the thing—in Europe, there’s still respect for cities. Even though many people here aspire to the suburbs, there has not been systematic disinvestment in the center. In dozens, if not hundreds of cities across the continent, the infrastructure is above average or considerably better, the innovation is so good it bewilders many Americans, and there’s a vibrancy in the air and a sense of safety on the streets that I seldom experienced in the United States.

Maybe that explains a significant part of the reason why I complained and why the city responded.

Integration after you move abroad might be at least partly that simple. You stop treating public space as scenery and start acting as though you have a stake in what happens to it.

The bench is still old with some graffiti. But I’m sitting on it now, and it doesn’t move.

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We’re planning to make our way through Spain’s north entirely by train, then fly back to Valencia from our final stop. A Coruña is one possibility, so I checked whether there’s a direct flight between the two cities.

I expected to find that an airline had decided there was sufficient demand for a direct flight. Instead, I found a public procurement process intended to help create or secure that demand.

The public debate about tourism usually begins when somebody steps off a plane.

But the story begins before the route exists.

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The municipal Tourism and Congress Consortium in A Coruña has tendered five route-linked tourism-promotion contracts. Bidding closes August 21.

In practical terms, the government is offering public financial support to attract airlines to the city. That’s not unusual, but it is intriguing amid the persistent focus on overtourism throughout Europe, particularly in Spain.

The base budget is €4.93 million through 2029 and can reach €6.62 million if extended through 2030. The routes are Málaga, Valencia, Bilbao, Sevilla, and Alicante.

The Valencia portion requires 208 annual flights and at least 37,440 available seats, with spending capped at €302,500 annually. Across all five routes, the tender seeks approximately 186,000 seats initially and more than 203,000 in later years. Those are two-way seats, not 203,000 incoming tourists.

Legally, these are tourism-promotion and connectivity contracts—not straightforward payments for individual passengers. But the promotion and the flights are inseparable.

Winning airlines must operate specified routes with specified frequencies and capacity while advertising A Coruña through their websites, search engines, social media, newsletters, aircraft, and airports. They must also provide seats for media and tourism-industry familiarization trips.

A Coruña isn’t literally buying airline tickets. But it is buying tourism promotion from airlines on the condition that those airlines operate the routes the city wants.

No route, no contract. It’s all aboveboard and regulated by the European Commission aviation-aid framework.

For some context, low-cost carrier Volotea stopped flying from A Coruña to Valencia and Málaga in April after its previous municipal agreement ended. The airline wanted to continue negotiating; the mayor said the airlines’ financial demands were unaffordable.

Several months later, the city introduced this new tender to restore those routes.

Like most Spanish cities, A Coruña has talked about “quality” and sustainable tourism. It began charging a tourist tax in September 2025 because officials said increasing hotel occupancy, cruises, and visitor numbers were creating additional costs and “massification” in some neighborhoods.

Yet the city also calls tourism crucial for employment and wealth and is now explicitly trying to increase its attractiveness and accessibility.

That’s an economic reality that I don’t think even the most hardcore activists would deny. The friction begins when cities aggressively expand tourist access—often through low-cost airlines—then treat the resulting volume and behavior as though they developed independently of those choices.

A Coruña says tourist-tax revenue can support services, preservation—and the promotion and development of sustainable tourism. But the stated policy reveals that the tax is intended to manage and support tourism, not discourage it.

During the tax’s first three months, A Coruña collected more than €400,000 while overnight stays rose more than 14 percent. The city presented the increase as evidence that the tax had not hurt tourism.

Of course, it didn’t.

In my experience, tourist taxes feel like pesky but acceptable add-on fees. My wife and I paid them on recent trips to Barcelona and Granada—just like any other tourists, including Spaniards.

They’re not going to stop a trip, particularly if you’re getting a “deal” to fly between cities on low-cost airlines.

For the record, we took the train for all legs of that trip.

In my opinion, more countries should follow France’s lead and put meaningful restrictions on short-haul flights. France prohibits certain flights when a satisfactory train alternative takes under two and a half hours. Even that policy could go several steps farther.

But at least it addresses climate change and the decision to fly rather than take the train. A tourist tax adds a relatively painless charge after the decision has already been made.

If you want “high-quality” tourists, your policy needs to be more than encouraging cheap flights then charging arrivals between €1.00 and €2.50 per person, per night on top of the cost of their accommodations, as A Coruña does. That’s not a lot of money within the context of a trip.

Barcelona goes considerably farther—roughly €6 to €12 per person, per night, depending on the accommodation—but I can’t imagine the tax has stopped a significant number of tourists, of any quality, from coming.

A Coruña isn’t trying to reduce tourism. It’s trying to increase it while using a modest tax to manage the consequences.

Which brings me back to Valencia.

Over the last several weeks, a local activist I follow has been documenting a considerably less abstract version of this story.

He has been highlighting a social media hashtag—Valencia is calling—used by young people from across Europe taking advantage of cheap airfares to come here and party.

It’s relatively inexpensive to reach Valencia, stay a few days, and eat and drink—or get drunk—here. So they’re choosing to go all-in amid one of the most beautiful backdrops in the world.

On social media, this could look like an effective advertisement for the city.

On the ground, the activist documents what can come with it: public drunkenness, people walking through residential neighborhoods shirtless or half-naked, noise at all hours, and tourists staying in street-level Airbnbs who drag furniture onto the sidewalk as if the space outside their temporary apartment is an extension of their living room.

I’m the first to advocate for lively and vibrant neighborhoods. We live in one where I have few major complaints—maybe because I sleep with earplugs and have a longstanding preference for a little urban grit and chaos over suburban soullessness.

That said, you’d have to be blind not to see the effects of low-quality tourism.

I could list them all day so I’ll just go with the latest micro and seemingly meaningless example.

The other day, as I rode in the street-level bike lane alongside Turia Park through Valencia’s Old City, I came upon a dozen young Dutch girls taking up both sides of a two-way bike lane. The Dutch—at least the young party-tourist variety—are often among the worst offenders.

I admonished them in my best Spanish and moved on.

One incident means practically nothing. Hundreds of versions of it every day start to affect how a place feels and functions.

Has tourism ruined my quality of life in Valencia? Not even close. But waiting until it does would be a ridiculous standard.

To be clear, Valencia is calling isn’t an official City Hall campaign. I have no evidence that the city created it or has anything directly to do with the people posting under it.

It’s a bunch of kids selling Valencia to one another as a playground—sometimes as travelers and influencers, sometimes as drunks.

Once a city becomes cheap and exceptionally easy to reach, the government no longer controls how it gets sold. City Hall can advertise culture, gastronomy, sustainability, and Mediterranean quality of life. TikTok can turn the same place into an inexpensive weekend-long party.

The city can target the tourist it wants. It can’t decide who buys the €39 ticket.

Valencia’s government says it wants “quality, not quantity.” Mayor María José Catalá has gone as far as saying, “We don’t want low-cost tourism that doesn’t respect the city.”

At the same time, the city-backed Fundació Visit València actively works with airlines to increase connectivity. Through its Fly València program, it participates in route negotiations, promotes new connections, and conducts joint marketing with airlines and travel platforms.

I haven’t found a Valencia tender directly comparable to the one in A Coruña. The machinery isn’t identical.

But Valencia is hardly sitting back and waiting for tourists to discover it.

During the summer of 2025, the airport offered 3.6 million seats on arriving flights—4.3 percent more than the year before—with 37 airlines connecting the city to more than 100 destinations. City Hall described those numbers as the product, at least in part, of coordinated work between the Fundació Visit València, airlines, and other destinations.

The airport ultimately handled a record 11.85 million passenger movements in 2025, an increase of 9.6 percent. International traffic—which represented three-quarters of the total—rose nearly 13 percent.

Recently, billboards around Valencia boasted about all the new places you can fly to directly from here.

Every outbound route is an inbound route, too.

This past week, Valencia took its “quality tourism” rhetoric another step forward.

Catalá announced a proposed new convivencia ordinance that would impose fines of up to €3,000 for the most serious forms of so-called uncivil behavior.

The highest penalties would apply to full nudity or clothing that leaves sexual organs exposed in streets, public spaces, or public transportation. Other serious and minor violations would carry smaller fines.

The mayor presented the measure as part of an effort to protect residents and reinforce Valencia’s reputation as a respectful, quality destination.

I’m fine with the fines.

I don’t want people pissing in the street, getting wasted outside somebody’s bedroom, doing drugs in a playground at three in the morning, treating residential sidewalks like the patio of their Airbnb, or walking around my neighborhood as if they never left the beach.

Punish that behavior.

But don’t confuse punishing it with addressing the system that helps produce more of it.

Cheap tickets don’t automatically create bad tourists. My wife and I use low-cost airlines. Most people who do arrive, enjoy themselves, and leave without dragging an IKEA table onto the sidewalk or walking around in a bikini when they’re nowhere near the beach.

Likewise, somebody who spends €500 a night at a hotel isn’t necessarily a good neighbor or somehow less implicated in the pressures tourism places on public space and housing.

That’s why quality tourism is such slippery political language.

It combines spending, behavior, length of stay, choice of accommodation, and cultural interest into one imaginary visitor who spends heavily, behaves perfectly, and barely leaves a footprint.

Valencia is expanding access while trying to filter the consequences through restrictions on tourist apartments, behavioral rules, and fines. Some of those responses are necessary.

Yet all of them operate downstream from the machinery still working to bring more people here: airline negotiations, promotional campaigns, record airport capacity, cheap fares, tourism platforms, social-media algorithms, and the public and private institutions that benefit every time another visitor arrives.

The drunk, ass-out, or shirt-off tourist is tough to miss. So are the Dutch girls blocking the bike lane, the bike tours crowding plazas and otherwise calm neighborhood streets, and the people dragging furniture out of their Airbnb or clattering enormous suitcases down the sidewalk—just travel with a backpack for fuck’s sake.

This is all easy to photograph, easy to mock, easy to fine, and easy to blame.

The procurement contract and the route-development program are much harder to see.

If the A Coruña–Valencia route returns, anyone who uses it to visit A Coruña won’t be arriving against the city’s wishes.

They’ll be accepting an invitation it spent public money to send.

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The conversation started with me complimenting them on the combinations they come up with and noting that the morcilla (blood sausage) is my favorite. On any given day, they have up to 10 or 12 varieties. And they’re always coming up with something new.

What’s even more incredible than how good these burgers are is that the lady who creates them says she has never come up with a mix of flavors that she ended up not liking. When she goes to another stand in the market to buy ingredients, she can already see the combinations in her head. Then she puts them together, and they come out exactly as she anticipated—ready for sale.

What’s even more interesting is that the owner of the stand who passed away several years ago was opposed to anything other than chicken only or chicken with vegetables. So, when he went on vacation, they’d roll out some special burgers. When he returned, customers were left asking for the specialties, which apparently warmed him up to the idea.

The conversation moved to food shopping habits—people, especially young people, want everything fast because they don’t have time—GMOs, and probably a few things that I missed.

But still I was able to follow along, understand most of what was being said, and contribute meaningfully here and there—in Spanish.

A year ago, I couldn’t have had this conversation.

Sounds like a victory. And, in some ways, it absolutely is.

That said, the realization that I couldn’t have done this a year ago—even a few months ago—didn’t make me feel fluent. It actually accomplished almost the opposite.

At first, I was trying to catch words. Then sentences, followed by basic meaning. Eventually, I started understanding a good chunk of what I was hearing around me—people passing by on the street or having conversations within earshot. Not everything, but enough to feel like I was making real progress—and enough to no longer feel completely shut out of the urban theater I love so much.

Around the same time—and I’m probably on the front end of what I think is a long process—I started to pick up on tone, personality, and tiny changes in direction and mannerisms that indicate an actual conversation is happening, not just a transaction or friendly small talk.

Don’t get me wrong—I still get lost every single day and have to ask my wife what happened or, when she’s not around, leave a conversation not knowing what happened. That happens less often—or, more accurately, I leave more situations with a reasonable understanding of what just happened.

I’m thrilled to have come this far. However, when I understood almost nothing, I couldn’t distinguish between what I was missing.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s fast forward to what it means in the present day at my present level with a micro example.

Over the weekend, we went to a museum. At the counter to get our tickets, I just assumed the woman asked for our postal code. That wasn’t me missing Spanish; it was just me not paying attention and operating on auto-pilot. Which is actually a win—I’m comfortable enough now to interact without thinking or, sadly, to ignore people.

So I started with our postal code and—turns out—she asked for something else. I forget what.

When I perked up and explained myself—He creído que dijiste (I thought you said, which I think is understood, but far from grammatical perfection)—the woman replied with what we thought was:

Me vale largo.

What both my wife and I heard was me vale largo. The problem is that, as far as I can determine, me vale largo isn’t actually an expression. Maybe she said me vale (fine by me), meaning the information I gave her was sufficient. Maybe there was another word we both misheard. We’re still not sure.

Which, of course, is precisely the point.

Whatever—the point is that I was expecting what I know. Something like no pasa nada (it’s okay) or no importa (it doesn’t matter). But the response I received—even if it was just me vale—wasn’t what I expected in that context and underscored my reality.

When I understood almost nothing, everything I missed blended together. I knew my Spanish was limited, but I couldn’t perceive the extent of those limitations.

Now I understand enough to recognize far more—and, intimidatingly, how far I remain from understanding all of it.

The gaps haven’t necessarily grown. They’ve always been there. They’ve just become visible, thanks to an increase in knowledge and capability.

This is the crazy thing about setting out on new and ultimately lifelong experiences and accumulating new knowledge. At the beginning, what you’re looking to experience, accomplish, or learn feels finite.

Learn words. Say sentences. Have conversations.

Arrive. Get an apartment. Start going to the same stands in the market. Talk to people.

Live in your dream neighborhood. Travel to other places. Do it again—and again.

We always think there’s a point of arrival when we’re trying to learn a language, move and get “settled in” abroad, or live our best lives.

But once you get far enough inside these experiences, you realize there is no clear point of arrival.

This extends well beyond learning Spanish.

I started formally studying cities and writing about them nearly 25 years ago. You might think that after all of that time, I’d feel increasingly certain about what makes them work. To some degree, I am.

But underneath that certainty, there’s something more important. The more cities I experience—and the more closely I look at the one where I live—the more conscious I become of everything I haven’t seen, experienced, or considered. Or what I have only just been exposed to.

Moving abroad works similarly. A change of scenery won’t solve every emotional or psychological problem you bring with you. But if you move with a clear sense of yourself—for reasons that pass the sniff test—and you remain willing to challenge yourself, getting what you wanted doesn’t close the loop. It expands the range of what you can see and imagine.

We tend to frame goals as destinations. Really, they’re often just entrances.

That doesn’t mean the original achievement disappointed you or wasn’t enough. It means you can now perceive possibilities you could never have considered from where and how you experienced life before.

After five years of writing this newsletter, that might sum up its entire point.

At the market the other day, I learned more about people I see every day. They told me a great story, and I understood enough of it to tell it here. But I almost certainly missed part of it.

A year ago, I would have missed almost all of it.

Spanish hasn’t become harder. I’ve simply learned enough to hear how much I still don’t understand. And to realize that almost everything you open yourself up to ends up being a vast landscape where full arrival and comprehension is just a fantasy.

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One went to the roughly 100 people who bought lifetime memberships and have been with this newsletter through several iterations. The other went to free subscribers, who signed up anywhere between nearly five years ago and as recently as last week.

I broadly explained where I think this publication can go and asked readers who value that direction to help me give it more of my time.

Some of you responded almost immediately—with paid subscriptions, gift subscriptions, direct contributions, and incredibly generous messages.

Thank you.

Now I want to show you what I’m asking you to help build.

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First and foremost, I don’t want to build a travel newsletter. That’s the last thing the world needs.

To further explain what I want to do it helps to understand where we’ve been.

When I started this newsletter, it centered on the Never Retire theme, bounded by the idea that traditional retirement is out of reach for so many people, including me. So it's better to not only acknowledge, but embrace this reality and structure life to accommodate it.

Then, my wife and I decided to move to Spain. So the newsletter naturally shifted to focus on that.

Once we arrived, it became about life in Spain.

The common thread is that this newsletter has always reflected what's happening in my life—both the theme and individual posts.

Now we're settled in Spain living the life I've spent several years anticipating and writing about.

I’m still going to Never Retire—but while we’ve arrived at the destination, it feels more like the beginning than the end.

So, from here, it only makes sense to give the newsletter a clearer focus for the foreseeable future.

Right now, a considerable chunk of my work away from this newsletter involves pitching stories to editors. Just the other day I had a pitch accepted—along the lines of what I discussed in a recent newsletter post—that should appear soon in Global Finance Magazine, where I’ve been doing a lot of work. I’ve included a link to my latest for them—about Chinese EV maker BYD’s European expansion—at the end of today’s post.

I just sent a pitch to another publication about an angle on overtourism that I don’t see discussed much in the news or the public debate. We’ll see what happens with that.

I identify a trend or spot something unusual or undercovered, develop an argument, and propose the commentary and reporting required to turn it into a story. Then—when the pitch is successful—I write it. While it can be frustrating, I genuinely like the challenge of this type of work, which sits mostly in finance.

I want to apply more of that same process to this newsletter.

In many ways, this direction makes almost too much sense given my history.

Nearly 25 years ago, I was formally studying cities and writing about them academically. I never really stopped studying them or thinking about how environments shape the way people live. At the same time, most of my professional writing—whether about investing, finance, or more popular topics—has always been strongest when I combine reporting with a point of view.

This brings those two parts of my work together.

Start with a question. Identify the place where that question becomes visible. Or start with the place and discover interesting questions to answer along the way.

Uncover trends, anomalies, and stories that don’t get any or enough attention, then go out and investigate them—through observation, local reporting, photography, research, and, when the story calls for it, conversations with the people who live with the issue every day.

I’ve already started doing this. But I feel like I’m only at the tip of the iceberg as my writing becomes increasingly a product of living in Europe, not merely being from the United States.

My recent posts about Valencia’s bicycle infrastructure didn’t come from sitting at my desk and deciding to write another argument in favor of bike lanes. They came from riding throughout the city, seeing where the infrastructure works and where it breaks down, following the politics surrounding it, and comparing Valencia’s progress with what I experienced in Barcelona and Paris.

The same applies to my writing about weak ties, public space, belonging, and the difference between urban inconvenience and urban vitality. The ideas come from research and three decades of thinking about cities, but also from walking out the front door and seeing how they operate in everyday life.

I want Valencia to remain the base for this work.

But I also want to expand the reporting ground.

Throughout Spain. Across Europe. And, eventually, much farther away.

Not to arrive in a city, walk around for three days, tell you where I ate, and move on to the next destination. There are already plenty of people doing some version of that—often very well.

I want to arrive with questions, or enter with blank slate and them come to the surface.

Here’s how people—locals, tourists, government officials—frame an issue, but here’s what’s behind their rhetoric and what it actually looks and feels like on the ground.

Here’s where and why a place seems to be doing everything right—or wrong—and how it can improve. And how can other places learn from these real-time and real-life experiments?

I want to do it in Europe, but eventually I want to considerably expand my scope.

For example, I can’t stop thinking about these videos I see of Americans living in China. They talk about the quality of life upgrade the way I do in relation to living in Valencia. But I can’t shake the pull of wanting to investigate exactly how your life could feel so much better in China, a country many Americans have been conditioned to believe is evil and a terrible place to live. Where do the rhetoric and reality meet—from both geopolitical and fine-grained local perspectives?

These aren’t firm itineraries or promises that I’ll be everywhere next year. They’re examples of the places and questions that increasingly occupy my mind—and of the direction I want this publication to take.

Travel will be part of it because changing environments sharpens your perspective.

But travel isn’t the product.

The reporting, observations, photographs, conversations, and essays that come out of it are the product.

Ideally, I’ll do this differently from the way a journalist typically approaches a place on assignment. I don’t want to fly in, collect a few quotes, confirm an argument, file a story, and leave.

I want to spend enough time somewhere to establish at least the beginnings of a routine.

The goal isn’t to arrive with a conclusion and use a city as scenery.

It’s to arrive with a question or arrive with very little and let the place complicate the answers to what I was curious about or didn’t even know was a thing in the first place.

Paid subscriptions help create the time and freedom required to plan and to work this way. To research before arriving, report while I’m there, and think and write after returning. To follow an idea beyond a single post and produce a body of work that connects what happens in one place with the choices people accept as inevitable somewhere else.

One-time contributions can help move individual projects forward, and I’m incredibly grateful for them. But ongoing monthly and annual subscriptions are what can make this reporting a consistent part of my work rather than something I have to fit around everything else. That continuing support is what gives an independent publication a foundation to plan from—not only for the next post, but for the next year.

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This is where the newsletter’s various iterations come together.

The Never Retire idea was always about structuring a life that doesn’t require escaping from it. Moving to Spain was the biggest step my wife and I took toward building that life. Writing about Spain helped me understand what changing environments reveals—not only about the place you enter, but the one you left and the assumptions you carried from it.

Now I want to take that method farther.

Spain remains the base. Valencia continues to be home, where I’m observing, participating, and developing many of these ideas. But the publication can use other cities as reporting grounds for understanding how environments shape behavior, what societies believe they owe one another, what they think their governments owe them, and why one place accepts as unavoidable what another has already proven can be changed.

That’s what I’m asking readers to help me build—not a travel newsletter, but an independently reported publication that uses places to explore the systems and question the assumptions shaping everyday life.

Some of these reporting ambitions can happen relatively soon. Others will require more time, planning, and support.

But the goal is the same.

I don’t want to see more of the world simply for the sake of seeing it.

I want to return with better ways of understanding the one we already inhabit and often struggle to make sense of.

Well, you’re excited now, but that’s your emotion and excitement talking. Just wait until real life starts!

A day doesn’t pass in Spain without my wife and me reflecting on the fact—almost in disbelief—that we’ve been living here for 19 months after more than two years of planning. Or without one of us thinking to ourselves just how crazy it is that life has taken us here—as individuals and together. We’ve both packed quite a bit into our combined 98 years on the planet and our nearly six years together.

We’ve both been soberly assessing and anticipating every step of the process of making this move. Assessing the moments as we live them and anticipating what would come next and how it might feel.

For me, a constant has been a rejection of the typical way people frame the honeymoon period—which leads us to my thoughts from 2024:

I also feel like we have already lived the so-called honeymoon period and will hit the ground running (and living) right away in Spain…

Time has a way of creating certainty or leading you to realize that you really don’t want to do something as bad as you thought you did after all. Giving yourself time and space between making a decision you can still change and the point where you can’t or would have a harder time turning back is probably a good idea…

Time has mellowed out the excitement from post-vacation euphoria—which feels great so there’s no reason to suppress it—to something decidedly practical. To the notion that as much as we’re changing our lives, we’re really just enhancing—upgrading—our existing lifestyle and—subsequently—our quality of life.

Put another way, the more euphoria-like excitement came and went with the decision to move in the first place.

We didn’t move to experience a rush.

We moved to continue doing life in a place where we recognized the advantages immediately because we knew the environment we were leaving. Because that’s pretty much all we had to concretely compare it to—that and our accumulated knowledge of places, how they make us feel, and how we operated inside of them.

This is the critical part for anybody considering a move abroad or any other decision where people like to say the novelty will wear off. Such as retirement, starting a new job, or even—to reluctantly use another well-traveled phrase—following your passion.

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Within the context of moving—

You arrive. Really, you know very little. All you have are your recent reference points. For us that was the United States and, specifically, Los Angeles. Then as that reference point fades and you accumulate experience and time on the ground in your new place, you know more and build new baseline reference points. So you start to expect more from your environment, especially when you see and experience what exists in your environment relative to what you see happening elsewhere as part of your accumulation of new experiences.

So, for me, seeing what Barcelona and Paris have done from an urban planning perspective and comparing them to similar things Valencia has done—and comparing that to the trajectory this city was on before a right-wing government took over and favored what amounts to pro-car actions and policies.

If you subscribe to the conventional honeymoon narrative, you might interpret any criticism of Valencia as evidence that my original enthusiasm was naïve. But recognizing that this city has work to do doesn’t negate any of the reasons why I love living here.

Just because it’s better as a city from urban planning, quality of life, and other standpoints than what you’re likely to find throughout most of the United States doesn’t mean it’s without problems or progress to make.

As time creates more space between where you came from (LA) and where you are now (Valencia), and you have new and diverse experiences (day-to-day living, seeing other places for the first time or from fresh perspectives), your old reference point fades. Somewhere around this juncture, I stopped comparing Valencia to Los Angeles and Spain to the United States as much as I used to and changed my baseline because my field of vision and experience expanded.

So I “complain” about things here more now. That’s not the part of the honeymoon narrative I reject. The recalibration is real.

It’s a recalibration in which ‘better than the United States’ stops being a sufficient or helpful standard. When you see how things are done elsewhere in relation to where you came from, hopefully you evolve to expecting the place you live in now to meet its own possibilities. You don’t sit around the table with other “expats” bemoaning “bureaucracy,” complaining because the clerk didn’t speak English, or noting where you can find Philadelphia Cream Cheese. You’re life exists in your new setting.

You see Valencia’s incredible bicycle infrastructure. Then you see that progress stunted at the same time as you witness more great strides in Barcelona and Paris. Criticism becomes something you contribute from inside your life here, not commentary delivered from an outside perspective living in the past that has very little to do with the present.

You know you’re becoming part of a place when you stop treating its problems as local color and start caring whether they get fixed.

To me, this is integration.

It’s not the moment when everything feels completely familiar—because it still doesn’t. It’s the moment when the future of a place begins to matter to you. When you start to have a dog in the fight because you’re walking and riding your bike on these streets and sitting in these plazas and supporting these local businesses. And doing this life right here and right now.

When my wife read an early version of this, she told me I was basically describing the end of the honeymoon period while insisting I don’t believe in it.

Semantically, she might be right.

I don’t necessarily reject the process people are trying to describe. Of course familiarity replaces novelty. You accumulate experience, notice problems you couldn’t see at first, and develop a more complicated relationship with the place where you live.

What I reject is the conclusion often assumed in the cliché—that your original excitement was mostly naïveté and reality eventually arrives to correct it.

So, the process is real. It’s the meaning people attach to it that I reject.

I’ve been through this process many times throughout my life. When I lived in San Francisco, I loved it there. I would defend that city against any and all criticism. I rode my bike with almost as much zest there as I do here. But I also held an ambitious vision of what was possible in that city based on what I was studying and seeing happen around me and around the world. I loved the place, but I knew it could be better and I wanted it to be better.

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Still, every night when I go to bed in Spain, I can’t wait to wake up in the morning.

I love walking out our front door and having our day. Going to the market, sitting in the plaza, taking walks with my wife, and cycling across the city. Working on our respective projects and enjoying a neighborhood where I can see the urban planning principles I’ve been studying and writing about for three decades happening in practice.

Life here feels ordinary without feeling any less incredible—which was the goal all along.

I also love being in the middle of an ongoing urban transformation, given I have a tendency to view things through the lens of city planning. Watching Valencia decide what kind of city it wants to become—and witnessing the conflict, contradictions, and regression happening amid what has otherwise been considerable progress.

If we lived in Paris, I’d have different concerns and criticisms. Some would probably be the same. Because no city is finished and no place worth caring about is without problems. Paris’s recent urban transformation should be a model for cities around the world, but even that praise doesn’t mean the place is immune to criticism and concern.

All of this is part of what makes city living so exciting to me.

As I said the other day:

The allure of suburbia often focuses on the elimination of these so-called urban stressors. But it also removes a source of intellectual and psychological stimulation from your life that I don’t think people—particularly in the United States, but also around the world—fully appreciate. I mean, even in SF and LA, I took “the good with the bad” in part because of desensitizing yourself so you can keep a smile on your face, but also because—what’s the alternative?

Every day, you can touch, feel, and experience the things that matter. You can see how political decisions alter the streets, plazas, and bike lanes. Cities offer a dynamic sensory experience that prototypical suburbia simply can’t match in quantity or depth.

After living the problems and limitations of Los Angeles and the United States, I can now see a world I could only imagine from there. Now that world in Spain is my day-to-day, so I’m immersed in the same type of thinking I’ve spent the last 25 years of my life doing—imagining how my new baseline urban environment could be better, even if it’s already pretty damn good. Even if it’s the best one I’ve ever called home.

Nothing I originally loved about this life and place has disappeared. What changed was my ability to judge Valencia against something more meaningful, present, and urgent than the United States.

You paid $100 once and received a lifetime membership.

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This doesn't mean cities—large, medium size, small, college towns—are perfect.

Obviously not.

Even I think cities in Europe have their problems and room to improve, but forget the country or continent of location, I've never understood why so many people choose to trade controlled chaos for unchecked boredom and soullessness.

Because—for me, after spending my first 25 years or so of life in pretty much car-dependent environments—once I experienced walkable cities I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Then, when I started living in one, I became obsessed and can no longer see myself living any other way.

As I noted on Substack Notes the other day, for our first year in Valencia, I mostly kept my mouth shut. When you move to a new country with a slowly developing grasp of the language, the smart move is to observe, not arrive like a wrecking ball.

But after 18 months, something shifted. Integration doesn’t mean nodding politely at everything around you. Real integration—to the extent possible as an American—happens when a place becomes your baseline, and you care enough about its future to regain your critical eye. I’m no longer comparing Valencia to Los Angeles or San Francisco.

I’ll get deeper into that in my next newsletter post, but it ties directly to today’s going concern.

When we first arrived in Valencia, if there was any “novelty” it was in finally being able to live in a truly urban environment where we don’t need a car after—for both my wife and I—more than ten years apiece in Los Angeles. I call it “a breath of fresh air” more than novelty. However you define it’s fucking awesome to navigate daily life by foot, by bike and—occasionally—via public transit. I couldn’t even do that fully during my seven years in San Francisco.

But I largely kept quiet about a lot of the issues connected to this for most of our first year here and some of the second outside of—it’s amazing to live this way! So, as I’ll discuss in the next post, I’ve moved on to being more critical of Valencia as it has become my baseline. I now compare Valencia to what’s possible in Spain, and what’s possible throughout Europe.

So, after 18 months, I have fully regained my critical perspective—the very same one I’ve had for the better part of the last three decades. One that’s inextricably linked to another constant over the last 25 years—my love for city living and environments.

Valencia is an incredible place to continue experiencing and exploring my urban obsession.

If you’ve been enjoying where this newsletter is headed, I’d love your support.

I’m trying to build something that’s part reporting, part observation, and part long-form thinking—using places like Valencia to better understand how cities, people, and societies work.

Paid subscriptions give me the freedom to spend more time walking, riding, observing, reporting, and writing from places in transition—across Spain, Europe, and eventually much farther afield.

If that sounds like something worth supporting, I’d be grateful to have you along.

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Valencia is a city in transition—and, pursuant to my Note, it’s not lost on me how the presence of people like me affects that transition—just like San Francisco was when I landed there in 1999. Just like East Hollywood was—and still is—when I started living there in 2018.

Over the years, all that’s happened is that the general issue of gentrification has broadened to include more elements that ultimately contribute to what amounts to controlled urban chaos.

• scooters

• Airbnbs

• crowds

• housing crises

• overtourism

• noise

• graffiti

• trash

• smells

• bike tours clogging plazas and narrow streets

• the occasional shopping cart or wheelchair in the bike lane

For me, all of these things and more are—without doubt—things to complain about and have opinions on.

That’s my life and livelihood!

But they’re also stimulation.

On all of these things listed above and more, suburban life can make you more of an outsider. Just as the longer I live away from the United States, I’m more of an outsider to what’s happening there, the same applies when you ditch city living for suburbia.

You no longer have a laundry list of things to “complain” about. Instead, your biggest bitch is about having to park too far away from the entrance of the strip mall in 38-degree heat or the traffic you encounter on your way into the city.

The allure of suburbia often focuses on the elimination of these so-called urban stressors. But it also removes a source of intellectual and psychological stimulation from your life that I don’t think people—particularly in the United States, but also around the world—fully appreciate. I mean, even in SF and LA, I took “the good with the bad” in part because of desensitizing yourself so you can keep a smile on your face, but also because—what’s the alternative?

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The alternative is comfort and convenience.

Or at least what we’ve been conditioned to believe to be comfort and convenience.

Wide roads. Quiet neighborhoods. Predictable routines. Parking lots. A backyard. Maybe less friction, tension, and conflict. And a lot less stimulation.

For some people, that’s exactly what they’re looking for.

For me, it feels like slowly turning the volume down on life—like closing the book on a chapter that makes you feel alive and makes the rest of the world still surprise you and feel readily accessible.

I’ve spent the better part of three decades studying, writing about, and living in cities. What I’ve come to realize is that many of the things we’ve been taught to see as urban inconveniences are also the things that keep us engaged with the world around us.

The conversations you overhear because there are too many people too close to you.

The construction project that’s been going on for months—maybe years— that you wonder about.

The new café that opens around the corner.

The protest in the plaza or coming down your street.

The scooter that shouldn’t be in the bike lane.

The shopping cart that somehow ended up there.

In cities, you’re constantly noticing something. This is hardly a trivial matter. The constant inflow of new experiences can help keep your mind active in ways that aren’t necessarily always comfortable and convenient, but necessary ingredients for your brain, particularly as you age.

Suburbia promises convenience. Too often, it delivers insulation and isolation, as my aging father is experiencing firsthand.

I’ll take the stimulation.

I’ll take the scooters. And I’ll happily complain about them.

I’ll take controlled urban chaos over the myth of comfort and convenience every single day of the week.

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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.

So, if you do choose to upgrade, many thanks in advance.

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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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