urban life

there is a thought running through my head for the past couple of weeks, for the time i have been working, that is. people have never been so close before in terms of connectivity opportunities (transportations, telecommunications, internet etc) but so far apart from each other. i don’t know what’s exactly wrong, but I have a few ideas:

1. work. no i don’t wanna sit around for the rest of my life by winning the lottery. but I have observed that by working 5 (for myself) or more (for a few other people) days a week, ending up at home in the evening, you feel like doing nothing. this results that in the weekend most of the times you just wanna rest to be ok for the rest of the week (when you will be working) and end up not seeing anyone or having any kind of serious social life.

2. big city lifestyle. when I travel with my work, it’s all fine, cos i am in smaller places. i finish work and within half an hour the latest i am back to my hotel, free to shower, eat, arrange meeting with friends in the evenings, read. but when i am in athens, if i finish work at 6 i am home at 8. same goes for the mornings, i have to leave much earlier to work. my day ends up being 21 hours instead of 24, losing three hours in traffic. and it’s not just the traffic. it’s the fact that this doing nothing and waiting and moving through all this noise actually makes you feel like a wreck in the end. the result is that you just wanna spend some time on your own in the weekend…

a lot of people i know complain that they feel alone in big cities, but they still wouldn’t quit this lifestyle for a smaller place. it’s more of a professional choice (opportunities offered), than a lifestyle one.

i feel i am one of the lucky ones. lived in 4 different places in my life, lamia (my hometown), athens, thessaloniki and rotterdam, all of them with pros and cons. and i know that, as much as i enjoy the advantages of a big place, i’d rather live in a smaller one and have access to the bigger place than spend my life there and be miserable throughout it.

so this becomes one of the big questions to decide on in the coming months: where i want to spend my life. it’s just about one of the most important decisions to make, along with the professional path i am going to follow.

till then, a temporary measure towards personal decay in this environment is to “force” myself to be active during weekdays and weekends, that is engage in activities i enjoy and socialize with friends, in other words, go where i want to go and not where the current of work and lifestyle take me.