The Most Depressing Place In America?
Your environment - and your attitude - matters more than anything in life
I’m sure you have an entrant you know well. And, of course, it’s all relative, dependent largely on the context within which you define depressing. But, in my experience, my hometown might be the most depressing place in America.
In today’s post, I explain why as we contrast where I’m from to that hotbed of urban vibrancy we’ve been talking about—the West Side of Buffalo.
But it’s about more than what is truly an objective comparison. It’s about discovering several times throughout adulthood that you have not only become the polar opposite of the place you’re from and most of the people who remain, but that everything you have accomplished and want to accomplish in life happens despite their influence.
They like to think they sent you off into the world prepared when it was merely some stroke of luck that YOU stopped THEM from holding you back. As a parent of a 20-year old, everything I write about today dawns on me harder than it ever has.
None of this means you don’t have love for the place you’re from and the people who populate it. It just means they have more than their fair share of unresolved issues that impact them and their children more than they’re able to see. Of course, we all have unresolved, resolving and—thankfully—resolved issues. Having them isn’t a problem. In fact, they’re a key element in growing as a person. The problem is a refusal to acknowledge, then address them so you can create healthier environments for doing life.
Somebody recently unsubscribed from the newsletter because they think the content is “all over the place.” I usually accept and sometimes use constructive criticism and move on. However, in this case, I disagree.
Everything we do and discuss IS connected. Everything. The light stuff (like travel photography) to the uncomfortable stuff (like today). It all helps define and illustrate what being semi-retired—living the semi-retired life—means to me. As a lifestyle, not a work arrangement.
How in the hell could you ever live this type of life if unhealthy anxiety controls you—whether it’s your anxiety, someone else’s or a combination of both—to the point of inaction or doing things halfway?
Make no mistake, I thought long and hard about writing this. In fact, I have hesitated for years. Out of fear that my parents, relatives or friends might read it (none that I know of actually read my work). Out of fear of hurting feelings and making people I know and love feel as if they didn’t do a good job. Or that I think I’m somehow better than them. It’s not at all about better or worse. Or even parenting. It’s about the environments we create and normalize as they stagnate and proliferate over the years.
Environments born out of anxiety. In my opinion, anxiety is the number one economic issue in America that we don’t even consider an economic issue.
I’ll explain what I mean, as we continue this bit of rawness in a second, ending with a positive note.
But first, I’m finalizing plans for what we’ll do in the newsletter when Melisse and I travel to Spain and France in February.
I feel like we crushed it earlier this year. However, I don’t like how the newsletter feels when I travel. As if it skips a beat. Surely, Substack can come up with a feature to take care of this problem!
So I want to crush it even harder on this next trip with a mix of what we do best—personal finance content related to semi-retirement and a look at life in the cities we visit. Which, on this trip, will be Barcelona, Girona, Montpelier, Lyon, Paris, Bordeaux and Toulouse. We’ll do something similar to, but not the same as we did on this last trip.
By then, we will have increased the cost of a newsletter subscription. So upgrade to a paid or founding membership now. And stay tuned.