June 18, 2024
Tl;dr - I’m tentatively planning on moving to Tempe, Arizona, next year probably in the spring.
On my way home from D.C. in July, I made a little detour, just a little experiment, and stayed a couple of nights in Tempe — no matter what, I would have to do a layover on my way from DCA to PVR, so I figured I might as well take the opportunity see my dad, who lives about an hour south of Sky Harbor, but unlike previous trips, this one was rather short, so I didn’t want to commute to his place and back to the airport.
Walking and e-scootering around Tempe, even with the awkward emptiness that comes with summer in Arizona and the 110F heat, I immediately had a premonition that this was the future — or at least, my future. I have always read the classic quote - “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet” — in a positive, utopian light. But in a place like the Phoenix Metro Valley in July — already facing the reality of climate change and the impacts of a warmer climate — my reading of that quote became much more nuanced.
That area is already facing the future — for both good and ill. But that also presents an opportunity — an opportunity to learn how to adapt and build the future we want to see in the world. I want to be a small part of that project, and, at least from a distance, it seems to me there’s political capital and financial capital in Arizona to accomplish these things. I love Mexico and I love living in Puerto Vallarta but as a non-citizen I’m limited in how I can engage in that project, and as a resort town, the capital for those kinds of things just isn’t here.
And I have to face it — while I’ll never stop being young at heart, I am in my 30s, and it makes sense to invest in and focus on my career a bit more than in my carefree 20s. A decade ago, I was living on a cruise ship in northern Europe, completing the last leg of a circumnavigation from Hong Kong through Russia to Europe and back to the west coast of the US, where I had rented a bed in a hacker house in Seattle because I certainly couldn’t afford more than that. This will be the first time I’m hiring a professional moving company to help me with the cross-border move, so that experience alone is a new one for me.
In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill touted the idea that it is good for a society to have a variety of “experiments in living on display in given society, to allow individuals to be inspired by a wide range of possible forms of life.” Regardless of what happens in November — politics is much more than what happens in the ballot box — no doubt there are reactionary forces that are trying to limit the approved “experiments in living” our communities are allowed to experience, and they’re not going away. I’m extremely grateful to have had the freedom to participate in various experiments in living and, as comfortable as it is, I’m not going to sit here from a distance and watch them take that away from my comrades without involving myself in that fight.
Of course, I’m not sure how much of an impact I, personally, can have on protecting the rights of our communities to keep experimenting and keep progressing, but I have always embraced this concept of “experiments of living” on an individual level, and participating in various “experiments in living” is how I’ve grown as a person. I’ve learned something valuable from everywhere and every-way I’ve lived. On a material level, I’m choosing Tempe because it’s relatively affordable, extremely bike friendly, fairly transit friendly (they have a streetcar that goes from downtown Phoenix, past the airport, through downtown Tempe and Mesa and beyond), urban, and surrounded by a giant university (Arizona State University) — one which I may or may not attend, but whose resources I will be able to use nonetheless — and yes, it even has a waterfront, so I might not even have to give up the waterfront view I so greatly adore.
And let’s face it — my family is not getting younger, and I’d like to enjoy quality time with them while I still can. If none of the rest of this plan comes to fruition, I can’t imagine I’ll have regretted taking the chance while I still could, which made this decision very easy — even obvious. I’m not a big believer in “spirit” in the extra-physical sense — “spirit” for me is just my hunch, what I feel is right — but in any case, spirit seems to be drawing me in this direction and probably has been for years, just like it drew me to Mexico before this and LA before that.
I head up to Tempe in September to do more recon and start scouring for apartments before I walk through any one-way doors, with an April timeframe in mind as my lease expires in May. So far I haven’t done anything I can’t change — and who knows, I might change my mind or alter course. But after a couple years recovering from the recession, I feel like I’m ready for new challenges — new mountains to climb, perhaps literally.
I put in the time and earned my Mexican permanent residency card. That’s valid for life. Should my finances permit it, I’m already planning on wintering in Puerto Vallarta just like the thousands of other snowbirds who do the same: it does, in fact, get cold in Arizona.
If you know of anyone in tech/entrepreneurial spaces in Tempe or the greater Metro Valley I should connect with, feel free to drop me a DM. I am actively looking for new opportunities, in the broadest sense of that word.