Where should I live?
The fantasy of the perfect place is outdated. Here’s what to ask instead.
“Zach, where should I live?”
I get this question often because people seem to think that I’ve answered it. So I thought I’d share where I’ve landed with it.
When we ask “Where should I live?” What I think people are actually asking is: Where’s the place where all my people are?
It’s a question I’ve asked myself too. Many times.
What I’ve come to realize is this: That question is a relic from a time that has passed.
It pulls us into a fantasy and longing for the past, one that keeps us from seeing the extraordinary new reality we’re all living in and co-creating right now.
So here’s the honest answer: There’s nowhere for us to move to.
No physical geography is going to solve for the emotion we are all longing for.
There isn’t one town, one village, one perfect place where all our dreams are waiting.
No city where we’ll magically find the community, practice, farm, creative vibe, perfect climate, temple, and the cultural magic all in one.
There isn’t a magical town that we haven’t heard of yet.
We’re not going to stumble upon it and we can’t build one from scratch.
The Myth of the One Place
A lot of people think the solution is to buy land with their friends and build it all from the ground up. And while that might be a beautiful adventure and it might create something meaningful…
It will not answer the deeper ache behind the question, “Where should I live?”
Because that question, at its core, is outdated.
It doesn’t actually point to what we’re really asking.
The emotion is real, but the question is wrong.
What we want isn’t a place.
It’s a feeling. A rhythm. A sense of belonging.
And that doesn’t exist in one single geography anymore.
We Don’t Need to Build Utopia - but that should’t stop you from trying.
I’m involved with, and truly love some of the projects that aim to create community in physical locations. These projects are important, powerful, truly special and should 100% exist.
However, we all need to let go of the fantasy that we’ll solve this underlying issue by buying land and building a town with all our friends.
That’s not home in the emotional sense that I am talking about. It’s a real estate development.
If you are waiting for the utopia you made a deck about to exist in order to feel at home, you’ll be waiting for a long time.
Real community is messy, complex, vibrant, eclectic and especially not made entirely of people who are like-minded. And today, it’s just not in one geography.
It’s bigger than one plot of land and it emerges organically. Today it’s so large and dispersed that it will never be able to be contained in any one of these projects, regardless of how good they are.
We’ve all felt what planned communities from years past, made of the same type of people, feel like. So do we really think recreating that with a modern spiritual brand is the solution?
I personally don’t need a retreat center and a farm and a temple and a market all designed by my favorite Instagram healers to feel settled.
I’ve simply shifted my perspective to the new global reality we all live in.
And I’m starting to build in some rituals that help me remember who and where I am.
That’s it and it’s a practice.
The World Is Our Home Now
We live on Earth.
Not just in a country or a town.
We live in a time where phones, laptops, planes, and Wi-Fi have dissolved the edges.
We can be anywhere, with anyone, in an instant.
Yes, those same tools might poison our attention and confuse our nervous systems.
But they’ve also changed the very nature of what it means to “live somewhere.”
Today, if we are lucky enough to even ask this question, the answer is that we live everywhere.
We carry our lives in our pockets.
That’s not a glitch. That’s the new architecture of being human.
By no means do we live “online.”
But the flow of what it means to be human has shifted.
We must integrate the new realities that are now available to us.
We connected the world, its people, and all of its information over the past 30 years.
Now it’s time to create the meaning layer in our physical lives.
The Village Is Bigger Now
So when we ask, “Where should we live?” what we might really be asking is:
Where can we go where all our people are?
Where’s the one place that has everything we want?
Where can we settle and never have to search again?
But the answer isn’t on a map.
It’s in a shift of perspective.
We live on Earth now. That’s our village.
Our friends, our ideas, our practices, our inspirations, are no longer tied to a single zip code.
We’re in the early days of what Buckminster Fuller called “Spaceship Earth.”
We’re the generation trying to understand how to live with that perspective.
We’re in a transition moment, and for those of us brave and lucky enough to jump into the unknown, it’s our job to figure out how to emotionally live on a planet instead of just in a town.
Pick Somewhere and Go
We can’t make the wrong choice.
We can only stay paralyzed in indecision.
Pick a place. Try it. Create a base. A studio in a city, a rented room in a house. Whatever…
Even if you only spend a few months a year there (LUCKY!!), you’ll have a place to land and that matters.
Nomadism is an amazing chapter, but it’s not a sustainable lifestyle for most people.
We all need a base. It starts to create rhythm.
A place to rest and return to.
Somewhere we can unpack, even if only for a moment.
That alone is sacred.
Gratitude Is the Answer
When that question comes up, pause for a moment.
Take a breath.
And feel this instead:
“Wow. I am so lucky to even ask this question.
I live on Earth.
I are home.
I just have to learn to see it.”
Personally, I’m writing this from a small town in France. I don’t live here and I don’t speak French.
But because of my phone, the inherent kindness of the human spirit, trust, and a steady inner compass, I feel completely at home. Not in this town because I am obviously a tourist, but inside myself.
I can navigate. I can eat well. I can meet strangers. I can pray, write, and be.
It’s no longer about physical geography.
It’s internal geography and gratitude. Overflowing gratitude.
That’s what home means now.
Gratitude for being alive during this brand new moment in the evolution of how humans live and gratitude that we get to be some of the first humans to ask this question in this way and experiment with the answers in real time.
So, Where Should We Live?
At home, within ourselves.
The rest flows from there.
And yes, it’s okay to want ritual, routine, and community.
We still want farmers markets, kinship, and land. But those things are everywhere now.
Truly. All around us.
What’s different is that our village is bigger.
Much, much bigger.
Which also means: harder to see.
Harder to feel.
Easier to miss.
Our parents had fewer options.
But also fewer existential longings about “where to go.”
We Are the Ritual
We create the rhythm. We are the anchor.
We find the retreats that call us.
The spiritual practices that bring us back.
The cities, town and places we love.
The friends we want to see every year, at the same place, again and again.
That’s ritual. I used to call my travel schedule my paper route. Because I just go to the same places year over year.
That’s modern pilgrimage.
That’s new community.
Our job isn’t to find the one perfect place.
Our job is to stitch sacredness, grounding, and flow into this global life that we get to live.
Final Thought
“Where should I live?” Points us to a time that no longer exists. Much like the philosophers I quoted above Stuart Brand and Buckminster Fuller, there is a new culture upon us and we are the creators of it. So while I don’t think you’ll find that magical place you’ve been dreaming of, you might be one of the living pioneers who are here to help others feel at home — anywhere in the world.
So, the next time you feel that question arise, “Where should I live?”
Try reframing the question with this instead:
“How lucky am I to even ask this?
How beautiful that I live on Earth.
How wild that I am are home, right here, in this body, on this planet, in this moment.”
That might not answer the question and drop you a pin, it will answer the emotional longing underneath it.
These are my thoughts and I’d love to hear yours. Please leave a comment or join my subscribers only chat were I host weekly live discussions on these topics.
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Nailed it.
I need place where no one is so I can build the things that enable me to be where everyone is with a good story and plenty of battery in my tank.
Next piece “finding my people” — sad truth is most people don’t have people like we do.
That’s what I’m hoping to solve for. The spaces and places people find people, raw inspired connected.
(I also kinda felt attacked and I’m here for it)
Love you Zach.
Beautifully expressed. I felt spoken to, seen, and registered a fresh perspective with the advantage of your insight. Thank you.