Live in a City that Lights You Up

The "where" of happiness is drastically underrated

The where of happiness is so often underestimated. Living in a place that goes beyond simply just being the backdrop for your life. Living in a place that feels truly, deeply home. Where you wake up with an effortless gratitude because you know deep to your core there’s truly nowhere else you’d rather be.  

I wake up every day and am thankful to live in Sevilla (ok, there are the occasional insanely hot summer days where my fealty is tested). When I walk around my neighborhood I often physically break out into a smile, seeing the vibrant colorful Spanish facades or observing the abuelos at the local bar playing card games huddled around a table in the sun, drinking cañas. You cannot put a price on the feeling of walking down a city street and that energetic buzz of joy for the simple admiration for what surrounds you. The energy permeates your very being, your soul.

I grew up in Southern California, where there is almost year-round good weather, plenty of activities to do, and some of the best and most diverse food selection in America. I actually did love my life in California, but I didn’t feel viscerally lit up by life in the way that I do here in Spain. I was lucky enough to experience a taste of that when I first studied abroad years and years ago. And once I had lived that, I couldn’t tune out the quiet whisper that something was missing in my life in Southern California. That as much as I loved the city and my friends, I was yearning for something more.

I refer to Sevilla as my soulmate city. The very first moment I stepped off the bus in Sevilla, I was overcome with an instant excitement and adoration for the city I didn’t know I could feel. Fellow Substacker Rocco recently wrote how he has a sense for a city within a few minutes of setting foot in it, and I believe this is true for most of us. Cities speak to us, if we tune in.

In my case, despite feeling that instant connection to Sevilla, it would be years and years before I came to the conclusion that Sevilla was where I wanted to be longer term. After a year of living in Sevilla, the American dream felt like it was calling me back. I had to find my dream job in California and “be successful.” That journey of returning back to California and finding my so-called dream job, and realizing that it was an empty dream, was a crucial step in realizing the wider path of coming back to Sevilla.

There’s a sliding scale of how you can view the city you live in. There are a lot of people who live in cities they like, others that live in cities they accept, others that live in cities they just tolerate, and certainly there are people who live in cities they hate. Finding a city that lights you up, that makes you feel something, is worth more than a million dollar home on the beach (unless that home is in the beach town that lights you up ;)).

The importance of the “where” of happiness. I genuinely believe that where you live can drastically affect not only your current state of well-being but the evolution of who you are to become in this world. The lessons I’ve learned and continue to learn in Sevilla open portals to self-understanding that would have remained strangers to me had I stayed where I was in California. And let me clarify, I don’t mean to say that people who stay where they grew up aren’t privy to this experience. Plenty of people are lucky enough to be born and raised in the city that lights them up. I tell that to all the Sevillanos I meet who live and love living here, and I see it with friends in California who have stayed there for the love of the city they’re in. The idea of staying rooted to your childhood home holds equal beauty if that’s where you feel home. My point is more that, if you’re not feeling that, perhaps consider the question: is the where of happiness underrated?

Photo by Agustín Núñez on Unsplash