How to Decide "Should We Move?" A Discussion with Ageist's David Stewart

The Dareful Project

Ageist Founder David Stewart thought he was moving temporarily to Park City, Utah from Los Angeles. Four years later, he’s still there. And he has done a lot of reflecting about what we gain and lose when we move somewhere new. Whether you’re thinking about downsizing, starting new in an Italian village or chucking it all and RV’ing around the country, David has thoughts.

We also talk about Ageist’s SuperAge quiz. Here’s more on what it means to be a Dolphin, Fox or Owl. (See who you are by taking the quiz.)

Dolphin: Dolphins are playful and curious, enjoying life in moderation. They value health and wellness without being fanatical. Their SuperAge strength is their ability to relax, but they might overlook simple actions that could enhance their SuperAging journey.

Fox: Foxes are clever and adaptable, taking an active role in their wellness. They collaborate with practitioners to reach health goals. Their SuperAge strength lies in their curiosity and thoughtful investigation. However, they can be tripped up by contradictory information.

Owl: Owls are high achievers, gathering information to create a personal program. They are independent and mindful, striving to be the best version of themselves. Their SuperAge strength is their insight and drive to understand and improve. However, with all that info, they sometimes lose the plot.

And here's David's recent essay. Sign up for Ageist's weekly newsletter here.

My current situation is one of accidental transience. We left Los Angeles in early COVID for a smallish mountain town in Utah. Out of architectural obsession, we bought a 1982 townhouse in a ski resort with the idea we would renovate it and then rent it seasonally. This meant it could not be our “home” in the normal sense, as we couldn’t have our personal stuff out if we were vacation renting it. This temporary solution has now been almost 4 years, much of which has been spent pondering exactly where we should live more permanently. Although I miss all the art and books and memories that are boxed in a storage unit, I miss them less and less every day. Not having them here means we have tremendous flexibility about where we can be: either here in the vacation rental or in New York, Los Angeles, or some other place. But it is also lonely, if that is the word for missing my things.

This is all a lot of heavy thinking around how we define ourselves, what gives us comfort, and where we find meaning. My friend Carlo has a rule: never live in the same place more than 3 years — it keeps the flow of new place-energy going. The downside is: it is very hard to plug in to a new community every 3 years then abandon it. Steven Meisel, the great Vogue photographer, once said he is not interested in having a retrospective of his considerable accomplishments, as it would force him to focus on the past and he is only interested in the future. My good friend Rob, about 5 years ago, sold his big house and moved to an apartment in Santa Monica. At this point, he still had a nice car, home furnishings, exercise gear, and the like. Since then, he has become basically nomadic, staying in various apartments around the world for a few months here and there. The car and the stuff are all gone. As he told me yesterday, he has never felt better or freer in his life. Rob is a very future facing guy. On the other end of the spectrum are a couple I know who bought a giant old house on a big property and have stocked it with all their lifetimes' accumulation of stuff. It feels homey, but the maintenance of it is a way of life.

I have chosen a life filled with variety: I love big cities and my big city friends while, at the same time, I love the mountains and my outdoorsy friends. What I really don’t like is being bored. I once had a proper house, filled with my stuff. Each weekend was about Home Depot, the Garden Center, and other chores. Now I have an HOA, some of whom are at this very moment painting the outside of our unit, which allows me the mental space to be able to write this. When I was younger, I identified more with what I did and the stuff I had. Certain stuff still warms my heart, like some of the baby artifacts that my mom managed to hold onto from my very early toddler days. There is something warming about feeling the continuum of history. As we get a bit older, some people become the Marie Kondo editors of their lives, others become collectors. I feel somewhere in the middle: missing some things, but not wanting to become an indentured caretaker of them. Maybe home is where our things are?

Transcript:

Debra Hotaling (00:04):

Hello and welcome to the Dareful Project. I'm Debra Hotaling. We are talking today with Ageist Founder David Stewart, about a subject that I have had with all of my friends, and that is where do we live? Do we stay in our home? Do we downsize? Do we move to Europe or closer to the kids or chuck it all and get an RV and live off the grid and go explore the country? I don't know, every day it's a different solution and we're all talking about it. And then I read David's lovely essay in Ageist’s weekly newsletter, which if you don't already, please sign up for it. It's brilliant. And the essay starts, my current situation is one of accidental transience. That's brilliant. And the whole essay is lovely, and David is going to tell us more. David, welcome.

David Stewart (00:57):

Thank you. It's great to be here, Debra.

Debra (00:59):

So how did you get where you are physically and spiritually? I guess there's so many layers to this.

David (01:09):

And they changed daily. So my accidental transient happened in March of Covid. So what happened was we were living, we had a loft in downtown Los Angeles in the Arts district. It was on the 10th floor. So we required taking an elevator, and I think it was about the middle of February. We have a good friend who works in high level medical community here for Intermountain Health. And she called us and she said, listen, this Covid thing, this is a real issue and you're going to have to think about leaving soon. And I said, oh, alright. She says, you've probably got about a month. Well, I think it was maybe two weeks later, she called me on a Wednesday and she says, you've got till the end of the week you need to leave. And I said, okay. And at this point, we were sort of living life in a hazmat suit because nobody knew what was going.

(02:09):

It was super scary. You had this potentially fatal, unknown airborne pathogen. You got an elevator, which putting those two things together, that doesn't sound like a good idea. And then we were going to the grocery store and masks and gloves and taking our Clorox and our vegetables. Nobody knew what was going on other than a lot of people were dying. And so my friend said, listen, they're going to shut things down. You need to leave. So I said, okay. And she lived here and she's married to my best friend who also lives here. And they had shut essentially the entire town of Park City down. There was no one here. And so we were able to rent a really lovely condo on the mountain for basically the utilities because there was no one here. And so when we arrived here, it was super freaky Debra.

(03:04):

It was like something out of a Stephen King plague movie. There were just no humans. There may be 10,000 units of housing in the area that I live. And once a week we'd see a light, we'd go, oh, there's a human over there where you'd see a car. It was just bizarre. And we stayed here, and then a few people sort of came back. And then what happened was we thought, well, this is actually really nice. Maybe we should think about this. And we became architecturally obsessed with a particular development of condos that were built in 1982. And we just thought, oh, these are so cool. And we sold our loft after the race riots. Remember that downtown la after that calmed down, we sold our loft and we were like, well, we're just going to wait for one of these to come out of the market.

(03:58):

And one did. And what happened was the poor people who sold it hired a dumb, dumb realtor who didn't put it on the park city MLS. They put it on the Salt Lake City, MLS. Nobody knew about it. And our realtor did. And he came in the market, he was like, full price here, now buy it. And he was like, well, I think you're overpaying by about $3,000 and we don't care. Just buy it. And so it's worth more than double that today. So it was like the deal of a lifetime. We spent a year rehabbing it. And so we were here, but it wasn't really an intentional thing. We just sort of were here. And then during Covid it was okay because nobody was traveling anywhere and everything was Zoom and it was super weird. But that's sort of changing. So last year, I think I skied 110 days last year, which is crazy.

(05:02):

But my current state of mind on this has changed. And I think I just want a lot, Debra. I just want a lot and I want living in the mountains and I want to be able to ski and I want to be around the animals. And it's so beautiful here. But on the other hand, this is, I'm going to sound like a bad mean person, but this is essentially a large retirement village. And people come here, they've made some money, they've come here and they sort of check out. They're not interested in building, creating, collaborating, making impact in the world. They've either already done that or they're never interested in that, or they just sort of want to be here and enjoy all the amazing outdoor stuff. And I realized, I was just in Los Angeles last week and I was around some really switched on people and I'm thinking, these are my people. I need to be around more of this. And I read you a quote that a friend of mine told me said, wow, I feel like Park City is a retirement village. This is like, I just made this discovery. And he was like, he says it's a retirement village. For those who made money in a professional sinkhole for those who fell for the idea they could continue to grow here. That's correct.

Debra (06:26):

Yikes.

David (06:27):

Yikes. So yeah, I know. Harsh, but correct. And I think that this, when thinking about where to live, you sort of want to think about what do you want? And when I lived in Manhattan for about 25 years and every weekend I was just fantasizing about how can I get out of here? Where can I go? I'm going to go to Hawaii this weekend. I'm going to go wherever because you can't, at least I couldn't do that. I was living on Canal Street. It was mental. And you just can't take that kind of intensity all the time when you get away. But then it's sort of this balance of if you want to have impact in the world, if you want to create something, you want to help people, you want to build something, you need people around you to be bouncing off ideas with, to inspire you, to inspire them to get new ideas. That's hard in place like this.

Debra (07:28):

And that's been the biggest argument I've heard for why Silicon Valley works. It's not tech big “T”, it's just that they're really interesting people and you meet them in coffee houses or you overhear conversations or whatever that spark happens, right?

David (07:45):

That's right. That's real. And as much as I would like to poo p that just being in Manhattan and just walking around, just riding a subway, you can't help but not have that impact you, that things are different. I mean, so what's going on in the Middle East right now? I live in what is live in Utah, which is essentially a democratic socialist theocracy. It's run by the Mormon church and they're for the most part benevolent and it's fine. But that whole sort of thing that's being played out in the Middle East is also being played out in not combat way, but in places like New York or Los Angeles, other big cities, that stuff is going to be like front and center. It does not exist here. Zero. There's no, the only way I even know about it is I read about it or I talk to my friends in cities and they're like, wow, this is getting really weird here. I don't feel good here. But you don't get that here. So that's sort of the upside of being here. But there's also the flip of that, right? So I think you mentioned this idea of living in an rv.

(09:14):

The people I know who've done that, it's like, okay, after about month three they're like, can we sell this thing? What can we get for it?

Debra (09:27):

Exactly. But I find that with everybody. I had a friend who needed to go to Hawaii, loved it, whole life, saving up for it, and then actually moved to Maui. And after about a year went, I can't do this anymore. It's whatever. It's too far away, it's whatever. So I wonder at some point, is it just our brains just, we always want the thing we can't have? How do we figure out comfort and freedom and having things but not being tied down to things? Help me out, David, what do we do?

David (10:02):

Well, I don't think you figure it out. I think that your friend who went to Maui, who leaves Maui, will probably be grateful for the rest of their lives. They spent a year in Maui, they did this thing and it was like an awesome thing. But then it's done, right? It's like you have an itch, you scratch it. It doesn't itch anymore. Okay, great. I spent a year living in Paris. Would I do that again? No. Am I grateful that I did it? Yeah. Do I want to live full-time in another country again? No way. It's too hard. I have too many other things that I would rather do than that. And I think that one of the revelations I had this year, Debra, is that home is where your stuff is. Home is not where your family is. Home is not like all that stuff. No, no. It's where your stuff is. And stuff is important. And I think that we're in a time where people are experiences, not things count. Things are expressions of ourselves. Things give us comfort. People give us comfort. But it's also really nice to, I have my books, my art and everything. They've been packed up for four years because we've got this nutty vacation rental lifestyle that we live.

Debra (11:16):

Yeah, that's why I'm surprised that I'm hearing you say that because you've been living without, those things have been in storage.

David (11:22):

It sucks. What can I say? It's not the way I would choose to be, it's just for financial reasons. We rent this place in the winter because we live steps from a ski lift. So that just makes sense. But I have to read a lot, and this is a lot of people send me, I'm in a position where people send me stuff all the time to tests and see if it works. And it's nice to have a place for that. It's nice to look at a wall and have all these books and be like, oh yeah, that book, oh, I remember what that guy said. Oh yeah, that was really interesting. If I don't have that physical thing, I've been trying to use a Kindle and Kindle's really nice because you can, there's a lot of information in it and I think it has a place. But I think the physical things, there's value to this. And I think that I don't want the purpose of my life to be the custodian of my things either. I don't want. But on the other hand, seeing these things, having them around, there's value in that. It's not nothing.

Debra (12:44):

This is fascinating. I did not know our conversation was going to go this way. I thought you were going to totally Marie Kondo on me here. I thought that we were just going to be living light with our little backpack and lighting out.

David (12:55):

I mean, that works for some people. I think that editing is a good idea. Absolutely. I have in my closet now, I've got maybe four pairs of jeans and I've got maybe a dozen and three or four workout outfits and probably a lot more sneakers than I need. That's down. It's about, I dunno, a quarter of what I used to have. I don't really need the other things. What I find is certain things become a distraction. I find having too many clothes is a distraction for me that I look in there and it's like, now it's like, well, what do I need to wear today? Oh, I've got to hunt through these five things to find this other thing. So that becomes a time to bring on misconduct, get rid of the crap that's a distraction and irritation and annoyance that's in your way, that's sort of cluttering things up. Get rid of that stuff. But the other stuff, I like to wear nice things. I like to have to have my art. I like to have my books.

(14:14):

I don't want to get rid of all these things. They bring value to my life. But here I'm going to tell you another story. You can give me some advice on this because I'm trying to figure this out. 15 years ago, I opened, rented a storage container in Oxnard, California. Why Oxnard? Because I was living in Los Angeles and Oxnard is cooler because it's closer to the ocean. So you don't need a climate controlled thing. It doesn't get super hot there. And it was cheaper and we were sort of moving some stuff and I was transitioning out of being a photographer. So I have in there basically 35 years worth of negatives and prints and stuff that I originally was paying $80 a month for and is now 15 years later, $180 a month. And I was just there last weekend. It's one of the reasons I was in Los Angeles to sort of see what's in there, what am I going to do with it? And I thought, should I, I don't feel like I could throw it out.

Debra (15:12):

No, no, you can't do that.

David (15:14):

But I don't know what to do with it. So I just was just sort of paralyzed and I was like, well, okay, nice to know it's here. I'm going to leave now as far as I got, I couldn't figure out what the next course of action. I have nothing useful to do with any of it. But on the other hand, I just couldn't bring myself to just call it the dumpster. That just also didn't seem right. So I did nothing.

Debra (15:44):

You did. And how did you feel when you left? Was it okay to do nothing?

David (15:49):

Well, I felt a certain sort of satisfaction knowing what was in there and understanding if I want to move it out, okay, this is the volume of vehicle, I need to do this. But then I thought if I move it out, where does it go? I know place to put it, so I guess I'll just leave it here. I can't think of anything else to do with it. So I know that's a case of stuff owning me, but I have to just sort of make peace with that unless I'm willing to just get rid of it.

Debra (16:23):

Just sort of hurts my heart though. Could you give it though, to a university or someone or the Getty or something? Photography.

David (16:32):

I'm not that famous.

Debra (16:36):

But you bring up a good point of what we own and what owns us. And I think mean that feels right, what you described. I have similar, I have notes for a lot of stories. When I used to write for the LA Times, I kept my notes because even though they're just handwritten on yellow legal pads, those are the voices of some people who are no longer even on the earth and it feels wrong to throw away their words. And I know that that sounds, I don't know how, it doesn't seem logical, but I can't throw it away. And so they sit in legal boxes in my garage and they always will, sorry, kids, you're going to have to go through it.

David (17:18):

Right? That's sort of the next thing. So it's like, okay, at some point I'm probably, chances are I'm going to die. Survey says we die at some point. And so then there's this thing there. Is anyone going to be interested in what's in there? Maybe for a second. But then it's like they're going to be like, well, what are we going to do with this stuff? We have to, it's not in perpetuity. This mausoleum of David's photos and negatives lives on that doesn't make any sense.

Debra (17:53):

But as long as you're not doing DRE figurines or something, I think you could have someone, right?

David (18:01):

It's very well organized too. It's not like some crazy hoarder thing. And there's just boxes with labels and they're very nicely stacked. And if I wanted to find something in there and bring in a box cutter, I could find it. But

Debra (18:15):

Are you surprised that you're feeling this way now? If you could have interviewed four year back self, would you have known how you sort of netted out on where you're living and things?

David (18:30):

No, I wouldn't have the living thing. I thought when we came out here, I thought, oh my God, this is amazing. I can live out here and I can do my work. And there's Zoom and there's what we're doing right now. This is fantastic. But that's where I was then. And now that I've done this and I don't see myself ever never wanting to engage with nature the way that I do, but it's not, I've come to the realization that you need these other people around and these other people are not here. They're in other places. And so I need to spend more time in these other places so that I can be around these other people.

Debra (19:27):

And you bring up a good point that makes this even more interesting and complex is that we have to, when we're making decisions, at least when I'm making decisions about this, I'm thinking here I am now 65, healthy, got a lot of interesting stuff going on, but there's going to be a point where I might be differently abled. There might be other stuff going on. And so do I plan for that future as well? Or do I just bail on where I live and move somewhere else? It feels like a three-dimensional chess board.

David (20:03):

It's dynamic. So I think that I read this interesting article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago about another one of my favorite delusions. The Forever Home.

Debra (20:15):

Yeah, yeah, let's talk about that.

David (20:18):

What people do is they'll come to a place like this and they get a piece of land and they're like, okay, we're going to build our forever home. And this becomes an all-encompassing activity for 2, 3, 4 years. And they build their thing and they're in it for a year. They sell it that we often think that we can project a place where we want to be. And I think some people can do that. I think some people do do that. I think some people live in the same house town their entire lives. But for a lot of us that doesn't work. And we come at it from the experience that we have from where we're at right now and trying to project that into the future. And we do the best we can. But where we are five or six years down the road or 10 years down the road, we're in a very different place and the world is in a different place. And so thankfully we have brains. And the nice thing about a brain is we can change our minds and we say, oh, well that was good. I did that. Okay, so now I need to do something else.

(21:38):

I think we as humans, I was listening to a guy who joined me on a talk last week talking about, it's like a financial thing. So how people are really bad at predicting their own lifespan and people who are not very healthy predict a shorter lifespan and they actually live much longer than they think they will be. And people who are very healthy over index on that. So they think they're going to live much longer than they actually do because we make these decisions based on where we're at now, and we're thinking like, okay, here I am and my trajectory sort of looks like this. But we very often get it wrong. And I think that's okay. I don't think we just adjust. And I think that's fine.

Debra (22:28):

Well, we need to talk about thinking about that. I took Ageist super age quiz and I project that I'm going to live to 95 to 105. David, am I overshooting?

David (22:43):

I have no idea. I'm not the oracle of mortality. I wish I was. I'd be incredibly rich, but I'm not. But thank you for taking the quiz. So I'm just going to plug the quiz. Go to ageist.com/quiz. It's the super age quiz, and you'll find out what kind of super age you are. And the point of the quiz is that what we found at ais where we were sort of delivering everybody the same kind of information, and I too am an owl and we, owls are very sort of science data. We love gadgets and we're very deep into that sort of stuff. We tend to be fairly, I guess more disciplined in how we go about things. Nothing, no good points and bad points to that. And the reason we make the quiz is because we realize everyone is different. And so people have different ambitions and different interests, and I spend time science reports. Most people, their eyes would glaze over and they're like, why are you doing that? So what we're doing is by doing this quiz and sort of doing these different animal types, we're able to then send people information that matches up with their interest in their ambitions.

Debra (24:04):

That's brilliant. Now how many animals can you be?

David (24:08):

Well, we try to keep it really simple because I don't, I think the quiz, I think we timed it out. It's a little under three minutes. It's like 10 questions. So we just did it into three animals. So dolphins, foxes, and owls. And we can maybe further in the future we'll add more animals or sub animals or stuff like that, or combinations of animals. But just at the moment, we just wanted to keep it really simple for people and just say like, Hey, if you are this kind of person, we're going to deliver information to you that fits your view of the world about what you're interested in. And so I think it's just sort of a better way to go.

Debra (24:51):

It's brilliant. And we'll make sure that we have all the information in our episode notes and any early learnings. David, from what you've seen so far on the data, because an owl, I have to know,

David (25:03):

Of course we thought most people would be dolphins, but all the people who've taken the initial quiz, the majority of people are foxes. And then I think the loo is probably the smallest group. So the Fox is the biggest group. The Dolphin is the next biggest group, and the owl is the smallest group. I think it's a very specific subgroup of people who've taken the quiz so far. So it's only been like a few thousand people I think out in the general population. My guess is there'll be more dolphins, but who knows? Wherever you are, we're happy to have you

Debra (25:46):

Just pods of ageist dolphins. It's going to be awesome. So we all want to know what you guys are. So please make sure that you check out ageist, make sure you take the quiz and interested to see what other findings you all have. And also make sure that you sign up for David's absolutely terrific weekly newsletter and all the other goodness that comes with Ageist.

David (26:11):

Thank you. Yeah, that'd be great.

Debra (26:13):

Thank you so much for talking with me today, David.

David (26:16):

Absolutely. It's my pleasure, Debra. You're an inspiration and I'm really glad we know each other and

Debra (26:22):

You too. We'll see you in Park City.

David (26:24):

Okay, take care.

Debra (26:26):

Thanks for listening to the Dareful Project. Please follow, like and leave a review. It really helps. We're on all your favorite platforms, Spotify, apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, audible. Tune in Amazon, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and YouTube. And to connect, you can email me at [e-mail]. That's Debra, D-E-B-R-A at Dareful one. That's with the number one.com. Thanks for listening.