Esteemed Reader,
I am in Marseilles and the courtyard (above) of my Airbnb contains all the joys which a courtyard must contain, at least by my philosophy.
It’s very green, with lots of potted plants and even trees which provide shade. There’s a table and four chairs and the walls on all sides are high enough for privacy. In the corner there’s a little covered area with a couch and a little wooden not-quite-desk, a soft chair and some footstools.
From there you can see back towards the living room and you can see the green venetian blinds (my favourite) which have been thrown open, outside both the bedroom and the living room because, crucially, both the bedroom and the living room open onto the courtyard.
I like it very much and I like how, when you stay at an Airbnb, you find new ways to live, and it’s something I have long thought about, especially when I was younger – I was aware that the world had many choices and I dreamed of endless optionality.
I knew about all the ways that you could be free in the world. You could be free by not committing to a woman, to a job, to a place, to a particular way of life. I refused even to commit to a phone contract and I saw the joys of life as portable phenomena which could be carried with me in my suitcase.
I wanted to speak many languages and have friends in many countries (I still do) and I thought that those happinesses would multiply without arrears. I would be a flâneur, sampling the delights which came my way and taking the best of what life had to offer, without repercussions – but I was in error.
I saw constraint as a way to limit pleasure, joy, maybe even wealth. Now I see that constraints are sometimes an effective forcing function. There is upside to commitment and that partially explains many things I did not understand when I was younger. I did not understand marriage and why people would commit – why could they not do so without the legal and societal framework? I did not understand having one job, for life (my father worked the same job for forty five years) – admittedly, I still don’t really understand this, but I’m closer to understanding it and I understand that he grew up in a different environment to me. And I did not understand staying in the same place all the time, but I do now appreciate that there is something very nice about coming back to the same place, all the time.
The young Edward had his eyes peeled for optionality. He knew that there were many very good cities (he had seen The Economist’s Most Liveable Cities list), and he knew there were many good women in the world (he had eyes and ears and sometimes a racing heart) and he knew there were many jobs in the world and that even some of them could be done from anywhere, with a laptop (he had been to Bali; nonetheless, he did not like it).
The laws of rationality will tell you that the larger the sample size, the more likely you are to find an outlier. This is true but it suggests that people, and cities, and jobs, are simply people, and cities, and jobs, rather than things which which interact with us in stochastic ways to cause relationships, senses of place, and senses of self-identity.
And so, metrics fail us, and they do not factor in the temps perdu that could have been spent going deep rather than broad and or the the soulache of searching, always searching, and evaluating, of waiting for the next best thing which could come along any moment, now.
Opportunity costs are real. Sometimes the thing that you are looking for is not always the shiny thing with the best attributes or compelling benefits and so on, and because most of the benefit you get from a thing derives from your relationship with that ‘thing’ which is something that is developed, cultivated, rather than something that is pre-existing in that person, place or thing.
Some clever maths people have even done the numbers on a mathematical approach to this – it’s called The Secretary Problem and you can read about it here. (I am aware that, having just disavowed rationality, I have no offered you mathematical solutions.)
And yet here we are.
Perhaps, gentle reader, you already know this. Well then, you are wiser than I, and I will continue to enjoy my beautiful marseillaise courtyard, as well as bowls of bouillabaisse, but I know too that I have started to tamp down the engines, that I see each new departure now as just a taste, a sample, rather than necessarily a new jumping-off point, because the field has narrowed, the options are fewer, and that is sometimes a good thing.
Thought we had telepathy, wrote an essay on exactly this last week!
If only my courtyard were as pleasant as the one in your Marseille Airbnb. I have tried, really tried, adding plants, places to sit, a table but surrounded by high walls on all sides and extremely dirty roofs that spill debris into the courtyard after each rainstorm. But the relationship I have cultivated with my current home, both the house and the town it's in, has been extremely intellectually rewarding and it's all been worth it.