Personal Notes on Moving

When I tell people I’m moving to France, their faces light up with the familiar hope: “Paris?”

As if the destination alone carries the promise of a better life. Though I’m not moving toward brightness, glamour or reinvention the way many people associate Paris with those things and Paris itself with all of France.

What I’m doing is something quieter and in many ways much more radical. 

This move is not defined by the crossing of borders for me, it is literally the crossing of thresholds.

During the last day I spend in my hometown I understand that it’s not a change of terrain that is tempting but a change in the texture of my daily life that I have been longing for so long. 

Living in the city demands urgency and a loop of comparison, positioning and over-performance for us to be able to “exist” and spend our limited time feeding the desires we borrow from others, internalize them until we feel loved and accepted. 

In contrast, the more I got away from the city the more I realized that “reputation” as we name it, is not a performance but a residue in rural living, a side effect of identity.

Here, reputation is not a curated asset but a slow consequence of how you live. It cannot be hacked or performed.

Something that accumulates slowly and can’t be wiped clean, reinvented overnight or borrowed. It’s accumulated through consistency, memory, and contribution.

Relationships there matter in a different way because they are not disposable or used as leverage to exclude or include. Your presence carries weight and so does your absence. There is a kind of discipline to this life that is not imposed from above, it is born of mutual dependence. It functions under different premises, not based on what you can offer in return, but what you are capable of sustaining. That difference is not romantic, it is structural.

Rural life doesn’t offer escape, it demands presence.

The more time I spent outside urban logic, the more I saw the deforming nature of ambition as it’s practiced in city life. 

As I got a bit older, I understood that the kind of ambition we are exposed to in the city, where people blur personal resentment with professional ambition and where “success” means navigating a dense web of appearances, alliances and invisible games, isn’t really about growth but about survival in a system that rewards performance over sincerity. It’s not rooted in talent or vision but in learning to master hypocrisy without ever losing your smile.

A life lived as a performance to master, not a process to engage.

And at some point I realized that this was distorting my perception, not only of myself but of others too. 

With time I realized that this approach is not just exhausting, it’s personally and socially deforming. I realized that I’m not misanthropic. I just hate the way people, including myself, behave under a certain layout and the huge role our environments play in shaping who we are and how we relate to each other.

There’s a huge cost to staying alert in an environment like this, that most of us are way too numb to be aware of. If you can stop distracting yourself and become aware, you begin to realize that the ground under your feet is no longer your own, it’s just borrowed space, constructed by demands that don’t even belong to you, your desires or your needs.

The more you try to feed it the more you lose the language for connection with others.

Where life is defined, it ceases to be meaningful.

In the city, titles replace truth and reality, connections serve profitability more than closeness and ambition overtakes solidarity.

In rural life where memory is long and reputation lives on, trust becomes necessity, not a virtue. 

The tragedy of modern city life is not only systemic corruption, it is the individual who mirrors the system in miniature, blending grievance with ambition and mistaking resentment for justice.

True community begins where we cease to weaponize the personal.

Even when the personal feels inescapable.

Freedom requires boundaries, not between people, but between self interest and the common good.

The most radical thing I can do now is to stay rooted in what feels real, even if it means stepping away from everything I have built over time.

Maybe changing the terrain is not about where I’m going, but about the kind of person I no longer want to be. 

— A.