Like every thought I post here, this is feeling I've tried to capture at this point of time in my life. Likely, my thoughts will change in the future, but if it were not captured now, I would never know how my beliefs changed.
Home represents comfort. Home represents settlement.
I want to move as far away from the feeling of comfort and settlement that I can.
I have no desire for comfort at this stage of my life. Difficult problems require require agility of the mind and environment to solve. It requires a rejection of creating a home. I feel this way, in part, because I had a home. I had settled. I had comfort. A downtown bedroom, spending quality time with my ex and a cushy job. All things I thought I wanted but in some part weren't fullfilling. I was not maximising the person I could be. The more time I spent outside of Vancouver last year, the more I realised I cannot settle. I must not.
When it comes to a career, there's two states one can be in at any given moment. You can either be exploring or you can be exploiting (See Algorithms to Live by, Tom Griffiths). I found the longer period of exploration in 2024 fruitful. I needed to try dozens of things to realise which one I must exploit. I recommend everyone try the phase of exploration and for a short period of time, retire the idea of a home. Don't be attached to a location. Don't be attached to a city. Be agile.
Be open to exploring new parts of the world. Seek new opportunities. Time will fly by, so be careful when you decide to exploit. But when you do, make sure to pursue it relentlessly. Build hypotheses, validate them or throw them away. Then, build more. Learn what you can from first hand experience.
We can look to history to fin a reason for this argument. The concept of settlement is recent one in humanity's history, only 3-4000 years old. Before then, for nearly 50,000 years, we were nomadic. The reason we're not today is explained beautifully by Yuval Noah Harrari in Sapiens. When we transitioned from hunter-gatherer to the agricultural age, the key discovery that allowed us to do this was wheat and barley farming. From requiring to forage and hunt for food, we could start cultivating food at will (weather permitting).
Unfortunately, there were side-effects of this settlement. Family sizes grew larger since we required the manpower in the fields. Famine became widespread due to inclement weather. We thought we had domesticated our food growth but the wheat and barley did not reside within 4 walls. We did. Wheat domesticated us. Grains grew plentiful as we lost our nutrition and arguably more importantly, our agility.
If you're young, reject a long-term home. Don't let the walls within a house domesticate you. Live nimbly, embrace change. Surrender, but continue to live life with intent.