Never Retire: Living The Semi-Retired Life

Never Retire: Living The Semi-Retired Life

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Never Retire: Living The Semi-Retired Life
Never Retire: Living The Semi-Retired Life
Never Retire: How Will the Greatest City in the US Feel After Four Months of Life in Spain?
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Never Retire: How Will the Greatest City in the US Feel After Four Months of Life in Spain?

Four months in, Spain feels like home. But we’re going back—for a minute.

Rocco Pendola's avatar
Rocco Pendola
May 08, 2025
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Never Retire: Living The Semi-Retired Life
Never Retire: Living The Semi-Retired Life
Never Retire: How Will the Greatest City in the US Feel After Four Months of Life in Spain?
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Next week, we head back to the United States for the first time since moving to Valencia, Spain in January. It's a trip we have had on our radar for a long time. We're only returning so soon because my daughter is graduating college.

Other than to experience the graduation and spend time with her, I have little desire to go back—and so soon. This feeling only has a little to do with politics. I'd feel the same—though under a different dark shadow—if Kamala Harris was president.

I prefer to live in Spain not directly because of anything Trump has done, but because it offers a much higher quality of life and far better urban environment than you can get in the United States. This has been the primary motivation for the move after years—decades really—of discontent with American cities. Even the best one the US has to offer—San Francisco, where I lived for seven years between 1999 and 2006 and have visited at least a couple dozen times since.

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how it feels to be back. As I'll discuss in today's Never Retire newsletter story, I'm confident about how I'll feel on and after this first return trip for reasons similar to the ones that influenced the move.

There's a such thing as over-hyping a place or situation, thinking the grass is always greener, and honeymoon periods.

There's also a realistic and practical, yet eager and excited approach to where you live and why you live there that's grounded in experience and objective reality. From the moment we decided to move, then settled on Valencia, this has been the dynamic. We knew what we wanted and what we would get.

No romanticization of life in Spain. Just an open mind to the challenges and the knowledge, illustrated by a—(not all that)—quiet confidence that Valencia offers a version of a lifestyle we could only half ass back home, plus—(as it turns out)—so much more.

Paid post continues with what makes Valencia feel like home, the things I’m not looking forward to in SF, and a little Spanish practice at the end — because you’re watching me learn in real time.

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