Moving out of my apartment in Shanghai
More than once, a social media follower asked me to write about how I travel so much despite having a full-time job. Here is an attempt at breaking down that question.
The last time I had an apartment was December 2019 (that’s now 2+ years ago). After nearly 3 years between Beijing and Shanghai, I had decided to return to the US for professional reasons. I just wasn’t finding the type of opportunities I was looking for at that stage of my career (also, China was making it harder and harder for foreigners to live growing/thriving lives over there).
So in January 2020 I got on a flight from Shanghai to San Francisco – right at the onset of the pandemic. As I was on the job market at that time, I didn’t know yet where I’d end up living in the US – NY? SF? LA? I was crashing the couch of some of my best friends when the pandemic hit with full force in March 2020, and that’s when I made a deliberate decision to not get an apartment since I didn’t want to be tied down during a time of such high uncertainty. 2 years later, I still haven’t had an apartment.
After I started a new job in May 2020, we were all remote, and I didn’t see the point of being in just one location while different parts of the world were navigating the pandemic differently. Also, as someone who is super close to his family, I was willing to take on the burden of pandemic travel (tests, quarantines, no vaccines, etc.) to go see my parents.
The past 2+ years I have stayed with my close family in Germany, with the extended family in Ohio, with my friends in SF, with the same friends’ parents in Arizona, I had 6 different subleases in NYC, did solo-travel/work in Argentina, Portugal and Brazil, and did a bunch of trips with friends to Syria, Afghanistan, Dubai and a bunch of other places.
More than anything, it’s a lifestyle choice. As much as I had endless freedom the last 2+ years, it’s also been challenging for me to not have a place I can call home or leave my belongings. Living out of the suitcase is fun until it becomes a really challenging life set-up. It’s shiny from the outside, but it’s a hassle when you don’t know where you’ll be staying at in a week from now. It’s fun, but a little over-glorified. You don’t have routines, it’s hard to build sustainable romantic relationships, and you constantly go through the motions of arriving, settling, and then uprooting again.
However, not having an apartment wasn’t the only reason that facilitated this life of work and travel. There are also other factors in my life which helped (and continue to do so): the fact that I have friends and family in different parts of the world, speaking various languages that help me “feel home” in different places, work that is remote-first, a hard-earned track record of delivering consistent and high-quality work (which means that I’m not being micro-managed at work, but can operate under trust-based relationships), working in job that have a high travel component, a German passport that lets me move freely (passport privilege is a real thing), early access to vaccines (again, pure privilege), but also my own mindset of wanting to see/explore the world. The list goes on and on – all these things both contribute and facilitate this lifestyle.
Regarding the cost, all the travel might seem like an expensive lifestyle, but the truth is that I saved on rent or living expenses. Yes a flight is expensive, but not if you can pay for it with points that you earned through many years of work travel. Or short-term rentals can cost you more than your usual rent, but a 3 week AirBnB in Lisbon can still be cheaper than one week rent in NYC. So it’s all relative, but at the end it was surely a cheaper lifestyle.
Is this lifestyle forever? Nope. I think I went to the extreme these past two years. It was a fun time, but I plan to get an apartment and slow things down in my life. I will always be moving and traveling, but I really desire to have a base going forward (or more than one for that matter).