How Much Time Do You Need In A Place Before You Can Say You "Lived" There?

Maybe it's just my early enthusiasm for the Spanish language as I'm in the beginning stages of learning it. Or maybe it is the case that Spanish requires more precision with, for example, verb choices than English. Usage also varies by place, which is a whole ‘nother subject.

All to say—we tend to throw around words in English with reckless abandon.

Of course, one of the best and most often written about examples is the word “great.”

Another—that is more relevant to our going concerns—is the verb “live,” and, specifically, “lived” in the past tense.

You'll often hear or see digital nomads say they lived in a place.

Really? ¿De verdad?

I have seen “I lived in (insert location, typically a European or Asian place, here)” thrown around no fewer than—(not, no less than!)—50 times in the last 48 hours. No joke.

Did you really “live” there or did you just visit for an extended period of time?

This distinction—how we use words—matters.

I'm as guilty as the next person of sometimes playing fast and loose with the English language.

However, having moved several times in my life, I see a problem with saying you have “lived” in a place if you merely popped in and effectively visited for a month, two or even three.

Suddenly, your opinion about a place matters in some larger context because you “lived” there. But you didn’t truly live in the place.

Doing work in a coffee shop, drinking coffee on a terrace and walking around—often to many of the tourist sites or local hot spots—for an extended period isn’t living in a place. It’s a working vacation, often part of a series of working vacations, typically for the relatively privileged among us.

I didn't get to truly know—and earn the right to be a mini-authority on—the places I have lived until spending, minimum, a year there.

I hesitate to even say I “lived” in Miami or Pittsburgh, where I only spent one year apiece, or Dallas, where I spent two.

So this throws my original criteria—when I started thinking about this—of, say, securing and satisfying a long-term lease in a place before you can say you lived in it. Because, if you did this, you likely also initiated and accomplished the tasks necessary to live in a place. Things outside of getting a temporary visa, counting your Schengen days or booking a “long-term” Airbnb. Presumably, you undertook mundane, everyday endeavors associated with securing a place as your base.

Absent not only anchoring activities, but considerable time spent in a place with the intent to stay in that place, it’s (if I may play fast and loose here) dangerous to say here’s how a place is or isn’t because I lived there when you really—when it comes down to it—didn’t actually live there. You’re sense for a place—something my wife and I quickly develop—isn’t the type of empirical evidence you should be pitching as representative of anything other than your sense.

I mean what in the hell do I know about living in Spain? Not much. Only what I can project based on my knowledge about myself.

What will I know this time next year? Not a whole hell of a lot that’s relevant in a concrete way to you or anyone else. I will know how the experience is working out for me.

This isn’t to say recollections of my experience won’t be helpful. They absolutely are, can and will be. It’s just a problem when the general conception of a place springs—significantly—from people with limited experiences in those places. It’s quite a distortion of reality on the ground.

With Los Angeles, it’s a completely different story. I have lived here—in the real and true sense of the word—for about 16 years. While I will never be able to definitively tell you if you would like living here or not, I can give you a well-informed sense of what it’s like in Central LA versus, say, Santa Monica or East Hollywood. I feel pretty confident in my assessment of how the vibes in the areas I have lived compare to places I have extensive experience with.

Because I have put in the time. There’s really no substitute for time. An old adage the internet has effectively rendered old and outdated.

If you can open a computer and put a few words together, suddenly you become a source of information based on little more than a small slice of time and well-intentioned, but often ultimately uninformed opinions. Uninformed because you didn’t put in enough time—as in, have a comprehensive enough of an experience—to have an informed opinion in the first place.

See the Medium article I wrote about “working” in coffee shops and cafes.

In addition to playing fast and loose with words, we love to romanticize things online and off. Especially with places and cultures that are not our own. If I love it and am excited about it, it only happens uniquely here. We’ll take this up in the coming days.