In the last few months, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time traveling between my former home city (Bombay) and the state I now call home (Goa). The two places couldn’t be more different from each other. Bombay’s streets are like a lively debate with a wise and stubborn old friend; Goa sometimes feels like a gentle conversation with a kindred spirit. Traveling between the two feels like a hangover.
Every time I land in Bombay, I have the opportunity to spend time with old friends, enjoy the energy of the city, microdose some traffic and chaos, and invariably – rethink my move to Goa.
And every single time I’m asked about life in Goa after nearly three (?!?!!!!) years of living there, and whether I miss Bombay, I find myself coming up with the same answers. They’re a combination of the usual platitudes associated with leaving the city – the pace of life is so much better, the air is cleaner, the grass is literally and metaphorically greener, the people greet each other as they walk by. I have endless good things to say about moving to Goa and about the fairly charmed life I get to lead.
The weird thing about being in this phase of life is that a lot of people are moving. In your twenties and thirties, it feels like lives are constantly in motion. It’s a relatively easy season for someone to pack their bags and leave home, in search of whatever it is that people pack their bags and leave home in order to find.
We love the promise of change
We’ve all gazed out of airplane windows and wondered what life would look like if we just packed up our nonsense into a suitcase and moved away. There’s a unique thrill in acknowledging a big world in which we can do anything, and be anyone. Our deep longing for fresh starts is probably the only reason that people throw parties on New Year’s Eve – people basically just gather to celebrate the potential and promise of a fresh start with copious alcohol and fireworks. And there’s no fresher start than planting our tired feet somewhere new and shiny.
Yet, after a few years of moving cities, it occurred to me that despite uprooting my life in pursuit of more (and finding it), I’m not sure that the emotional tenor of my life has changed that much. Hard days and wonderful days still show up amidst the days that go as expected. Excited anticipation and anxiety still shape my perception of the future. Feelings of insecurity and confusion still surface sometimes, along with feelings of contentment and self-assuredness.
I’ve moved to a new place. I’m surrounded by different people (including my daughter, a person that is literally brand new, like I got her less than a year ago, and I still haven’t taken the tag off). So how could it be that, although everything’s changed, I’m still the same?
I recently learned about a psychological theory called the hedonic treadmill that two psychologists in the 70s came up with, and I briefly alluded to it in my essay on whether experiences make us happier than material possessions. The idea behind this ‘treadmill’ is that your happiness level has a loosely fixed benchmark. When major good things or bad things happen to you, your sense of happiness may shift for a bit. But then it returns to a relatively stable state, back to its benchmark.
In fact, some researchers speculate that our brains are physiologically wired to prevent us from experiencing sustained positive or negative emotions entirely. We’re apparently always working at maintaining some kind of homeostasis as far as vibes go – but that begs the question: If not sustained happiness (or sustained better-than-my-life-right-NOW-ness), then what are we all actually striving for?
Every job change, degree, relocation, and big life event is with the hope of making us sustainedly happier – and now it turns out we can’t actually get that much happier than some arbitrarily assigned baseline?
If the details of our lives can significantly change without significantly changing us, how do we find the motivation to relentlessly pursue anything?
The stuff we’re led to believe about change may not always be true
There are certain things that we’re set up to believe will change our lives. When we finally get our dream job, when we take that trip, when we hit a fitness goal, when we meet our significant other. All of these things are enticing because they’re full of untested promise.
I was reflecting on the memory of my first trip to Goa. It was just after my 12th-grade exams. A few friends and I went on the quintessential Bombay-girls-visit-Goa trip. It was so special and wonderful in more ways than I can recount, and I was SO taken by the whole experience that just before leaving, I promised myself that I’d come back to live there. On my last day, I sat at a beach shack and used oil pastels to draw in my diary what might be the ugliest sunset you’ve ever seen. That’s how inspired I felt.
As a 17-year-old, I expected to move back to Goa as a cool digital nomad, taking a gap year to be an insufferable hippie person. I never in my wildest dreams expected to move here during a pandemic and then be mostly stuck indoors for the first year. I expected to spend my days communing with dolphins during my morning swim. I SURE AS HELL did not imagine spending my ‘Goa season’ pregnant and caring for a newborn. I have so much to tell that 12th-grade girl, but she’s too busy drawing an ugly sunset. Best to leave her be.
Even though I knew all this hedonistic treadmill sadgirl stuff before I moved, I was super excited about the untested potential. I was gonna be a different person in Goa, a better person. I planned a whole new wardrobe of linens and loose stuff (clearly entering my coastal grandmother era). I embraced the digital nomad lifestyle and carried my laptop everywhere (pain in the butt because most places in South Goa don’t even have plug points and I got so much sand in my keyboard). But I totally bought into the hype.
Yet, after living here for nearly three years, I now have this distinct unchanged feeling. All of it lends new depth to an expression I’ve always loved: Wherever you go, there you are.
If change doesn’t change us, then who/what does change change?
There’s a peculiar beauty in our expectation of change. Like, we’re so stupid and naive about it that it’s actually kind of adorable. We imagine that big life changes are what redefine our lives, but the irony is that we can often go through those big transformations while remaining largely unchanged inside. I’m not saying that’s always the case, but it’s often the case.
A similar unchanged feeling showed up when I landed my dream job a few years ago. It was surreal and confidence-boosting, and super gratifying to hit my career goals a few years earlier than I’d planned. I thought that would set me on a trajectory for a whole new life. I built expectations for certain turning points only to discover that they’re just bends in the road. The road still leads to the same destination.
It’s a great destination, don’t get me wrong. It’s just – not what I expected? Rather, I don’t feel how I expected I’d feel.
My personal takeaway here is that doing what you love, or making decisions that bring you joy – these are great ways to live a satisfying life. But the magic doesn’t lie in the ‘having done’ but in the continuous doing. Continuously.
Reflecting now, I guess we make the mistake of thinking that if we change our life circumstances, we can change ourselves. But change doesn’t necessarily work that way. It’s not like entering an elevator and pressing the button “Hippie in Goa” or “McKinsey” and coming out on another floor as a different person.
So should we just not bother changing anything? Why is this essay so miserable?
One day in my mid-20s, I was complaining to my now-husband that I would never fulfill my dream of living alone in another country. We were on the path to getting married and I knew our plans would keep us tethered to India.
Although my dream wasn’t to explore the world, I wanted to explore what my life might look like if I lived in another country. Alone. You know – just for the experience. To see what it was like. To fiNd MySelFFF. “I have to do this for me,” I insisted.
Looking back, it was driven by young ambition, lots of popular culture narratives, and every girl’s hunger to discover herself in the midst of adventure and in the unknown. Nothing wrong with any of those things. But instead of an answer to my living-abroad-alone conundrum, I was asked the question: So what if you never do? What if you don’t get to experience those seasons in the way you expect? Can you still find a way to enjoy your life and be happy?
Of course, the answer was yes.
We can want something to change, but that doesn’t mean that our lives are any less valuable if they don’t. What was obviously a compromise at the time also turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. Both can be true. On the surface, it might sound defeatist to ask ourselves, ‘What if things don’t change?’ but there’s a surprising freedom in that question.
It was a helpful realization for me, and over the years, I’ve turned that realization into action. I started making a list of things that I don’t want to change about myself or about my life. And it feels oddly rebellious every time I add something to the list. Everything around me might constantly be pushing me to want more and have more and be more, but it’s nice to just be like – no.
I’m starting to appreciate the genuine effort it takes for some things to remain the same in a world that’s literally always forcing us to stay in motion.
The non-linear change path
I’ve been bashing on change a lot, which can sound like I’m just trying to romanticize my sad boring life that hasn’t changed as much as it could have. I’d be okay if that was your takeaway from this essay.
The bottomline is that change isn’t always straightforward. There are times we need to accept ourselves as we are, and other times we should be fed up and tired of our same-olds. As Elizabeth Gilbert said, “I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.”
There’s a time when we need to recognize our weaknesses, ask for help, and strive to grow, transform, or heal. Big life changes can sometimes speed up that realization. They can give us the space and freedom we need to make those steps of growth. Sometimes we need to move cities, pursue that job, and do the thing.
So then, why am I writing about this highly subjective matter?
It’s because real change, personal growth, or transformation for me didn’t always look like a dramatic movie montage. Most people I know that have ‘changed’ as individuals have done so almost undetected. We put so much emphasis on new experiences, when in fact, change is composed of hundreds of subtle shifts that cannot be measured.
And these shifts continue to go unnoticed until we bump into one directly — like saying yes to something you’re afraid of, saying no without an apology, finding yourself more able to keep trying rather than being bogged down by rejection. We can have moments where we surprise ourselves with who we have become.
My hot take
When we see change as a behind-the-scenes process, we start to value the gradual transformations that take place, sometimes with our awareness, often without.
Even when the big moments we expect to change us don’t, it doesn’t mean things are set in stone. We’re not static beings. It’s only when we take a moment to look back that we see how little shifts have shaped us into something new, leading us down paths we never expected.
And there we are, changed, even if we didn’t see it happening.
Back to the subject of moving to a new city. I’ve done it once as an adult, and here’s my take: In our current town or city, or wherever we live right now, we tend to think we know how life will pan out. We already know everyone in it. We know what the place has to offer. We’ve been there and done that. So we feel like the script is already written, and the future is right there in front of us, clear as day and boring as ––
But being in one place (or with one person, or at one job, or in one apartment) for long enough makes you intimate with its weaknesses. And that’s bound to happen eventually, wherever you go.
While I stand by the importance of trusting your gut, I’m increasingly embracing the notion that perceptions can change without dramatic upheaval. Big life changes don’t always need to redefine you, and ultimately, you’ll remain you – no matter the circumstances.
If you take yourself with you wherever you go, it might as well be someone you actually know; someone whose company you like. So, it’s worth asking: What makes you happy right now, as you are? Because no matter where you go or what you do, that’s probably not going to change.
Leave a reply to Change Mechanics – Unfinished Conversations Cancel reply