There’s a scene in the popular TV Show The Office I think about a lot. Ryan Howard talks about Jim Halpert in this condescending way: “Jim has worked at the same place for five years. Jim eats the same ham and cheese sandwich every day for lunch. I don't know, if I were a betting man, I'd say he will have a fun weekend in Philadelphia”.
Now that I think about it there are more quotes from The Office about staying in the same place in your life. It is implied that most of the employees at Dunder Mifflin are Scranton/Pennsylvania born and raised, and throughout the show’s many seasons they are presented with different opportunities to move on from Scranton but most of them end up rejecting the first few times.
Though it’s just a TV show in the end, there’s a lot of realism in depicting the human condition when it comes to the delicate balance between feeling somewhat limited by your environment that you’re so familiar with vs. the fear of the unknown that can come from a new environment’s exciting prospects. As a guy who’s also moved around a lot, what is the way to decide where to live?
Much of my early life moves were not decided by me. My parents dictated where I was going to live. When we first moved to Canada I was excited because I didn’t have that much attachment to my existing friends, I was kind of a social recluse at school. That also carried over to Canada so I didn’t make a lot of friends in Canada, which made the move to SoCal easy. In SoCal I had my first true friend I think, a friend with the name Sean. I don’t remember much about the guy, but I just remember thinking: “This guy is my friend and I would do anything for this guy”.
We left all of that behind and went to Korea when the IMF crisis hit, and now I was back to my hometown with all of this international experience that nobody else in my hometown had. Maybe it’s because I had the friendship with Sean, making friends was a bit easier. I had a group of friends to finish elementary school with, and at junior high I was hanging out with a regular group of people.
Then the day to go to America again came. This goodbye was a bit harder because around that time I was old enough to have an opinion about my preferences. I didn’t want to go to America again, I wanted to stay in Korea. But oh well, a seventh grader won’t be the boss of their life and we moved to America again. I wrapped up junior high and finished high school to go to upstate New York for college.
As my sister and I moved on to college my mom moved back to Korea to be with my dad, but instead of moving back to my hometown of Busan they settled in a new city called Anyang. So now I had 2 homes: Ithaca, NY and Anyang, Korea. After wrapping up grad school I needed to go to the army so Anyang became my home. After my military service I wanted to gtfo to America asap, and I got a job at Apple.
This was the first voluntary move I did in my life as an adult. I had lived in California before and when I went on business trips to Cupertino while my visa was being prepared, the bay area didn’t seem that much of a different place than SoCal. I got married with my wife and we settled in San Jose. Then I abruptly got fired and got a job in San Francisco, and turns out the commute wasn’t that great if you’re doing SJ-SF every single day.
We decided to move to Fremont because I wanted to take the BART instead of the CalTrain. And boy was that a great decision. We loved living in Fremont, a small city with a lot of character. At the time it was relatively cheap to live there, compared to the rest of the bay area. It also had a dog park in walking distance… It just had a lot of great things going for us. But it is at this time I had some big reservations about continuing life in the SF bay area.
I could see the next 5 years living there, but for some reason I couldn’t see myself living the rest of my life there. Constantly worrying about rent, interviewing for better jobs and better pay practically all the time, always trying to catch up to real estate prices… I didn’t want to do that anymore. So my wife and I decided to look at, casually, some jobs in SoCal where we occasionally visited and had a great time at.
Then one day I randomly applied to Disney and one day I randomly interviewed and got the job. We were moving to SoCal. After one year in Burbank we’re now living in a suburb of Los Angeles and now we’re imagining the next place we will live at: Europe.
So I did a lot of moves, but when I think about it the only two places I truly loved living at was Fremont and my current home. I already listed all the reasons why I loved living there, so while we have the reasons… How did I get there? Did I have an intention? Did I do a thorough cost/benefit analysis? Did I look at my current deficiencies and try to address it with a location that had my deficiency? How does one decide where to live, in a Buddhist way?
Already Home
The first dharma is the most fundamental when it comes to location of living: you are already home. Every human has a home. But they all have a different location. If you’re like me and are of multiple cultures, then what constitutes home? This kind of an identity crisis is popular among multinational people. When home is a concrete place, it becomes an attachment and when we have attachments we have no choice but to suffer.
So we look at the least common denominator of a home. I’m home in America, my friends in India have a home in India. We have very different standards and features of homes but we are both home. Then what is the essence of a home that makes it a concept? As discussed above the nation we’re born seems to not necessarily be a continued home in 2025. When I’m staying somewhere and I call it home, what if I have to move again? Then was it a temporary dwelling or was it a home?
When you become a monk and renounce the world, the common conception is that you become homeless. And that’s somewhat right; both homeless people and monks have no permanent residences. But what separates the two are, monks know and operate under the truth of them being a home to themselves and homeless people are under the same truth but don’t realize it, thus think of a home that they don’t have.
A building without you is just a building. A building becomes home when you decide to live there. In dependent arising we like to do an analysis of cause and effect, and cause is divided into two portions: individual and environment. When I live somewhere, I am the individual. I am at an environment, like a building, and put the two together = you have a home.
This formula applies regardless of where you live. Even if I’m staying at a hotel, when I decide that this is the environment I’m living in for the next 2 days it becomes a home to me. Since I started my coaching practice I’ve been doing a lot more traveling than I did before, and one big contributor to my energy not being depleted when I complete a travel is the idea that I’m always home; there is no need for me to worry or stress about the fact that I am not home.
Open Possibilities
Whenever we have a big plan, it sounds nice at the first glance but big plans generally tend to be causes for suffering because 1) we either achieve it and arrive at dependent happiness, but we get used to it and we need to crave it again OR 2) we don’t achieve it and we suffer.
Suppose I have grand plans to move to Paris. If I have expectations about what Parisian life will be like, how I’m going to eat the freshest bread and butter every day and how it will be like a Disney movie for the rest of my life… I’m up for disappointment. Not because Paris sucks, but because of the mechanics of suffering explained above.
Life’s opportunities and chances are best experienced when they are serendipitous. Wouldn’t you agree? We have entire movies and books just based on the magical feeling of serendipity. The core component of serendipity is that it’s not forced. The more you try to force a serendipity (as we see from stories) the more it moves away from you. Then how do you not force something? What is the mechanism behind us forcing something?
It’s the deep desire behind something. And for us to have deep desires, we have to have deep deficits. When you are not happy with where you are right now, you will always want to fill that gap. When the opportunity arises, you will try hard to get it which will often times distance you from the opportunity OR even if you get it, the happiness will be short lived, you will have been burnt out, and so on.
When we have the idea that we’re already happy, any random chance becomes a serendipitous invitation. And this is already how life generally works. Think of all the little chance-based things that have influenced your life’s trajectory. The more of these chances you take, the more of an open life experience you have unlike Jim Halpert from The Office.
The formula is relatively simple. 1) Be happily home to yourself wherever you are, and 2) leave yourself open for possibilities. When you keep these two in mind, you will be happy wherever you are. Like I mentioned before I’m thinking of living in Europe. But I’m also happy with the idea of living here until I die. So I just randomly apply to jobs in Paris, just to see what happens. We’ll live in Paris for a month, just to see what happens. Who knows? Maybe we’ll meet a taxi driver or one of my coworkers has a referral or I’ll run into another solopreneur at a Parisian cafe. I keep making my opportunities with a happy, open mind.