The luxury or caring
The city I’m temporarily living in is not my cup of tea. It’s a small place where nothing significant ever happens, and visually, it has a few (very few) points of interest. But in every other way, it falls short. There are no tourists because no one would choose to come here, the locals who can afford to leave do so, and those who stay or come from elsewhere are either tied down or here for work, like me. This place is worth nothing.
One of the first things you realize when you start living like a nomad is that everything stops mattering. Your personal energy isn’t infinite, and when you’re out of your comfort zone without optimized routines to make life easier, everything feels harder. At first, all your time and attention go to the essentials, leaving no strength for anything else.
Maybe if the material circumstances are more comfortable, or if you’re in a place that genuinely interests you, it makes sense to get involved and invest in connections—both with the place and with people. But that only happens when your basic needs are met, and you still have some energy left to spare. If you’re pouring everything into just getting by, and you collapse into bed at night with your batteries drained, anything beyond survival ceases to matter.
One of the first lessons I’m learning in this transitional phase of my life is that the ability to care about something is a luxury. In our everyday lives, we take it for granted because we never consider that caring has a cost.
The city I’m temporarily living in doesn’t appeal to me at all, but honestly, anything outside my plan is irrelevant. The nearly nonexistent energy I have left at the end of the day goes into thinking about what I want to achieve and how happy it makes me to be succeeding because each day that passes brings me closer to my goals. Everything around me now—everything I like or dislike, everything that could be changed, all the people and their lives or thoughts—none of it exists for me right now.