Never Retire: Quality of Life Isn’t a Listicle
It’s structural, it’s real—and it’s why I’m not going back.
Quality of life has taken on a life of its own. It’s an example of what’s bad about the constant flow of information via news and social media feeds.
We’ve sucked all the meaning out of it.
Like so many overused phrases, “quality of life” has become a list, a viral post—something that gets repeated so often and reduced so shallowly that no one knows what it actually means anymore. When quality of life shows up in a headline, we just open the story or post even though we know exactly which cities will be on the list and what the article will say about them.
Quality of life illustrates how we tend to uncritically go through the motions online and in the day to day.
Another abstract concept floating around with zero utility—because most people aren’t moving to Oslo or Copenhagen, nor should they. These “best cities to live” lists don’t account for who you are, what you value, or how you actually want and need to live.
And that’s a problem. Because quality is real. It’s daily. And it matters.
It’s the difference between spending 20 minutes biking to the beach and spending an hour in traffic to go nowhere. The difference between a café terrace filled with neighbors, local visitors, and tourists and a parking lot filled with strangers. The difference between feeling calm as a default—or constantly needing to escape your own life.
That’s what we’ve found living in Valencia. But try explaining this to someone here—especially someone who’s never lived in the U.S., or only visited briefly—and they often look at you like you’re exaggerating. As if life in the U.S. couldn’t possibly have such an objectively low quality of life. As if we’re just romanticizing Spain.
I wish that were true.
But what we’re describing isn’t an exaggeration. It’s actually treating the concept of quality of life the way it deserves to be treated. With concrete details and nuance drawn from lived experience and a strong sense of what you want and need to live how you want to live now and for the duration.
I Think People Do Think We’re Exaggerating
Within five minutes of stepping off the train in San Francisco, we saw people shooting heroin.
Every morning, we’d sit in a plaza with a $6 coffee—this in what’s widely considered the most desirable neighborhood in the city—and witness a circus of untreated mental illness. On the worst day, someone screamed at us directly. On the others, we just sat in quiet awe of what was unfolding around us. It became so routine, so normalized, that it took something truly jarring to snap us out of it and remind us how far from normal it really was.
This wasn’t new to us.
Just a few months earlier, we were living in Los Angeles and doing the same thing—absorbing scenes like that into the background of our daily lives. Because when you live in it, you adapt. You desensitize. You cope. Until you leave—and only then do you realize how much you had been tolerating just to feel vaguely okay in a place that barely works.
And it’s not just LA or San Francisco. This isn’t about two cities. It’s about an American pattern: high cost, low quality of life, broken systems—and the expectation that you should feel lucky just to be there.
When my wife’s daughter called from the Metro in LA after returning from Spain, she mentioned someone smoking crack in her train car. She wasn’t shocked. She lives it. She knows it’s not an exaggeration.
Back in LA, someone was shot in the supermarket parking lot—for nothing more than turning the wrong way. Around the same time, shoplifters returned to the same store and shot a security guard in the leg. All of it happening right between Larchmont Village’s multi-million-dollar homes and the heart of Hollywood.
Even on a lighter note, the contrast remains bleak: San Francisco’s streets felt empty. Most restaurants closed before 10 p.m. And everything—from groceries to rent to basic everyday life—was absurdly expensive.
Why Quality of Life Shouldn’t Be a List—But a Lens
It’s not that the U.S. is unlivable. Many people make it work. I did, for decades.
But what’s not even acknowledged in all the listicles and lifestyle content is that quality of life isn’t a ranking. It’s a framework.
Not something you scroll past, but something that drives you for better or worse.
When you take it seriously—when you stop thinking of it as a buzzword or content—it starts to show you what matters. How your days feel. How your city moves. Whether your stress has a source or just a permanent home in your body.
That’s what Valencia confirmed for me. Not because it’s perfect, but because I came here already thinking about this stuff. Quality of life wasn’t an accident. It was part of the plan. One of the reasons we moved.
The quality of life here did not come as a surprise. While visiting certainly helped, my obsession with cities and how we exist in them made me all but certain that living in Spain would make the idea of ever doing life in America again come off as—to put it kindly—patently absurd.
Now I have the contrast, but I didn’t need some surprise revelation.
That’s the difference. Now that I’m living it, I can see clearly how low the quality of life really was in the U.S.—not just for me, but structurally, systemically, day to day.
That’s not exaggeration. It’s the power of having a before and after.
Because once you have that contrast, you stop asking “What city ranks highest on some list?” and start asking—
What do I want my days to feel like?
That’s where quality of life stops being a buzzword and starts becoming a blueprint for how you want to live today and for the duration.
If this way of thinking resonates—if it helps you see your own life a little differently—consider supporting the system that keeps it going.
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How to Actually Use the Concept of Quality of Life
You don’t need to move to Spain to feel what I’m talking about.
You just need to take quality of life seriously—not as a trending term, but as something real. A living, breathing part of your everyday existence—from the seemingly mundane to the kind of moments that feel quietly mind-blowing.
Instead of asking, Where should I live?, ask:
What kind of mornings do I want?
What do I need access to every day to feel well?
How long is my commute—and what does it take out of me?
Can I afford to rest?
Do I feel safe walking outside after dark?
Am I constantly trying to escape my own daily life?
These are the questions that shaped how my wife and I designed the second act of our life—and the Never Retire structure itself.
Quality of life isn’t one big thing. It’s all the little things, connected and taken together. Working in concert with one another.
If your days are always in conflict with how you want to live, it doesn’t matter how much you earn or how beautiful the skyline is.
Quality of life is the system that holds you up when everything else shifts.
It’s how you build sustainability—not just for your finances or health, but for how you move through the periods of time when you used to just go through the motions.
That’s what Never Retire is built on.
And it’s why I write every day. To show what it looks like—not in theory, but on the ground, lived and refined every day.
Quality of life—what I mean
Russafa / Valencia, España
This was a fabulous piece.
Quality of life is not a single common denominator. In our recent email exchange, I mentioned the latest quality of life ratings from Monocle. They do something interesting where they evaluate particular cities out winning or losing on certain aspects and then have an overall candidate.
I think the things you mentioned here would be valuable additions to the way they think about things.I’d say it’s worth having another knock on that door that didn’t open when you knocked the first time.