The great deception of the transient life is mistaking an overdeveloped exit muscle for true personal growth.
I've left every city I've ever loved within four months.
Lisbon twice. Mexico City. A surf town on the Portuguese coast where I knew the barista's dog's name and the lineup order at my favorite break. I was happy in all of them. Left all of them.
A buddy back home has lived in the same house for eleven years. Same street. Same neighbors. He knows which tree drops leaves on his car in October. He can walk to three places where people know his order without him saying a word. He told me once that his favorite thing about his life is that nothing surprises him anymore.
I almost threw up when he said that.
Because somewhere along the way, I turned leaving into a skill. Dropped out of college at 19. Left a relationship at 22 because it felt too comfortable. Sold my company at 32 because I'd mentally checked out two years before the papers were signed. Walked away from a woman in Mexico City who used to save me a seat at her favorite taco spot every Thursday because she started talking about next year.
Every time, I had a reason. Good ones. Smart ones. The kind of reasons that sound like clarity when you say them out loud. "It wasn't serving me anymore." "I'd outgrown it." "I knew it was time."
That's the trap. You get so good at leaving the things that don't work that you lose the ability to stay in the things that do. Your exit muscle gets so strong that your stay muscle atrophies. And you start mistaking the urge to leave for wisdom when really it's just fear in a nicer outfit.
I didn't quit my company because I was done. I quit because it was about to require me to change. To become a different kind of leader. To have conversations I didn't want to have. To let people depend on me in ways that felt heavy. The business wasn't failing. I was just uncomfortable. And I'd trained myself to read discomfort as a signal to go.
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The woman in Mexico City. She didn't do anything wrong. She mentioned a trip six months out. That's it. A normal thing a normal person says when they like someone. I felt my chest tighten, and three days later, I was browsing apartments in Lisbon, telling myself I needed a change of pace.
I wasn't looking for a change of pace. I was running. I've been running and calling it exploring for years.
You know this one if you're honest. Maybe you killed a project right when it started getting hard. Not because the idea was bad, but because the next phase required you to sit in uncertainty and keep showing up anyway. Maybe you ended a partnership the moment it needed real negotiation instead of an easy agreement. Maybe you moved somewhere new and felt that wave of settling in, the part where it stops being an adventure and starts being a life, and your hand was already on the eject handle.
Leaving feels clean. Definitive. You're the one who made the call. You're in control.
Staying is where it gets ugly. Staying means someone sees you on a bad Tuesday. Staying means the work stops being new and starts being repetitive, and you have to find meaning in the repetition instead of the novelty. Staying means you might build something you can't walk away from without it hurting.
And if you've spent fifteen years practicing the exit, that sounds less like commitment and more like a cage.
So you leave. Again. New city. New cafe. New break to learn. The first two weeks are electric because everything is unfamiliar, and your brain reads unfamiliar as progress. Week three hits, and the barista remembers your name, and you can feel the roots starting, and something in your chest tightens.
I'm in a small town right now. Waves are good. Rent is cheap. There's a woman at the cafe I work from most mornings. We've talked enough that she asked if I wanted to get dinner this weekend.
My first instinct was to count how many weeks I had left before I was planning to move on.
My second thought was quieter. You always are.
I said yes. I don't know what comes after that. I don't need to. That's the part I'm trying to learn. That not knowing what's next isn't a reason to leave. It might be the only reason to stay.
Anybody can walk away. Quitting is easy once you've done it enough. The hard part was never leaving. It was staying long enough to find out what you would've built if you hadn't run.
— Best, Jose
