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4 Things that Surprised Me about Living in Brooklyn

I lived in Brooklyn for 5 years. Here are a few small things that continue to surprise me about this place: 

1) How affordable some parts of Brooklyn are

New York City – Brooklyn in particular – has a reputation for being expensive, which is usually true, but I was surprised to discover some parts (like South Brooklyn) that are pretty cheap. Too often people only consider the popular or standard neighborhoods instead of finding a place that is a good fit for them. These neighborhoods, in my experience, are often more expensive, more crowded, and otherwise less enjoyable to live in. 

My rent of $1,500 a month for a single bedroom was below the average for the country overall, and I have never seen cheaper groceries than in the stores around me. I averaged $219 per month on groceries. On top of that, I did not need a car, meaning no car payments, car insurance fees, gas expenses, or trips to the car mechanic. 

Thus, Brooklyn has cost me about the same as or been cheaper than most other parts of the US I have lived in. The trick is to find the right part of the borough to live in. 

2) Its ethnic quilt

Brooklyn is a hodgepodge of races and ethnicities. Each group is surprisingly concentrated into distinct neighborhoods (often based on historical waves of immigration) that transition suddenly. In a few blocks walk, you may pass through several very distinct ethnic enclaves with different feels. If you walk only a few yards, for example, you may shift from a predominantly Chinese or Yemeni neighborhood. More than say Manhattan, this gives the borough the feeling of a quilt with distinct feels in each section. 

3) How helpful people are

New York City has a reputation for being stand-offish, but that has not been my experience here. People – in both Brooklyn and other parts of the city – may prefer quick interactions, but they are really helpful. You often have to get straight to the point rather than exchange long touchy-feely pleasantries and will keep the interaction short, but Brooklynites and New Yorkers, in general, will give the shirt off their backs if that is what you need.

4) How alive yet reclusive Brooklyn can be

I am the type of person who needs stimulation, yet I feared that living in Brooklyn, the constant churn of traffic and people would slowly drive me insane. Maybe some parts of the borough have this issue, but I was surprised by how quiet it can feel. I can have activity when that is what I want or I can retreat into my quiet apartment when I need to relax. It’s been a great balance of adventure and tranquility. 

(For more a fuller personal reflection on what my time living in New York City meant for me, click here.)

How to Survive as a Young Adult: What You Can Do to Live A Satisfied Life during Your 20s and 30s

As someone in my early thirties, these are the aspects of life that I have found useful to feeling satisfied and fulfilled during this stage in life. If you are unhappy, feel free to think about whether you lack any of these and then determine the best ways to cultivate it. Be patient with yourself as you do; it can take months to grow them, and you have done nothing wrong if you are missing some of these; you are not a failure. 

1) Intellectual growth: Are there things you are learning in your life: new skills, new perspectives, new things about the world, etc.? That can range from formal education to more informal methods like reading books, watching insightful videos that teach you something (all over Youtube or Netflix), or stimulating conversations with others. It can also range from learning about abstract academic subjects like philosophy to drawing to studying ants (because why not). Everyone has their own thing. For some, learning communities like book groups or other meetups where you learn with others help keep them accountable and encourage them to think about the topic in a new way. 

What you are learning about can be useful for your career or completely separate, but developing wholly unrelated skills can teach you something new about yourself. Follow passions beyond what is “useful” or can be applied to your daily life: it helps you grow as a person. For your career, it may even give you inspiring new ideas about what you want to do with your career. That and it can be a lot of fun, helping fulfill you in ways you did not realize you needed. 

2) Creativity: Are you producing anything cool? That could be art, writing stories or poetry, wood carving, drawing comics, dancing, or whatever you love in life. For example, my friend and I write a haiku a day (a small three-lined poem) and over the last few months, we started writing one short story or essay a day (like 300-500 words or a half page). Writing is my form of creativity and art, but you can also do supposedly “logical” activities not just artistic ones, like solving math puzzles that interest you (which I have done from time to time; I’m that kind of nerd and love it), conducting science experiments, programing a computer game, or building a computer from scratch. 

For some people, their intellectual growth and creative activities are the same: they learn about a topic area as they produce things in that space. But, it is important to determine whether you are exploring each one adequately. Some people who combine them into one activity lean towards one and do less of the second without realizing it, leaving them unfulfilled. If that is you, you could develop whichever one you are lacking through another fun activity. 

3) Introspection: Exploring who you are, what gifts you offer the world, what you need in life, and what you want in life. In my experience, too many people just “go with the flow” in life and follow what society or others suggest they do, become, or value. 

Instead, it’s important to think about what you value in life, what makes you happy, and how you can use your gifts to help make the world a better place. What do you offer the world? What have the opportunities in your life offered you (your job, your family, your group of friends, etc.), and to what extent have they helped meet your needs and allowed you to become all that you can be? Finally, to what extent have you been able to offer your gifts and abilities to the world? 

If any of these spaces you inhabit are lacking, it can be okay to advocate for yourself to make sure they meet your needs, find supplemental communities in your life that add the aspects that these communities lack, or leave any of those communities entirely. (Which one is best in any given situation is an incredibly complex judgment call to make, but when you are lacking what you need from the environments you are a part of, it is usually some combination of these three responses that ends up resolving the issue.) No one knows what you need better than yourself. 

A helpful way to start thinking about what you offer the world is to list the jobs, courses, projects, programs, and other things you have done in your life (both fulfilling and unfulfilling) and list what about them has given you life (aka motivated you) and what about them have frustrated you or otherwise stifled your life. List what impact you made in that setting that you are proud of as well. Then look for common patterns across these lists: What common patterns emerge about what inspires you, and what about what frustrates you? This can help determine both what types of skills you offer and also what kinds of communities to look for that might best incorporate and cultivate your skills. 

4) Mentoring and leadership: Do you have the ability to grow, teach, or inspire others? Examples of this can range from parents raising children to mentoring or teaching others to managing a team of employees who you help grow and become all they can be. Many psychological studies show that people tend to feel most satisfied in life when they have both mentees then can mentor and coaches/mentors who can, in turn, mentor them. 

In addition to learning, we become more fulfilled when we feel like giving back to others in our community. Some people do this through their careers, either in their official job description or by informally helping others in their workplace. Not every job gives people the opportunity to do that, though, so others do in other communities of life: within their family, their religious communities, within their groups of friends, in clubs or social groups they are a part of, etc. If you are lacking this, think about how within your current social network, you might be able to mentor or lead others, and if there are no such opportunities, brainstorm how you can branch out and do it in other ways. These can range from volunteering to workplace mentorship programs to help youth with their homework to hanging out with your lonely neighbor when you have the time. 

If none exist, think about what skills you can offer and help others through. You can use Recommendations 1 through 3 to try to come up with a few ideas on how, and if none of those work for you, brainstorm how you can branch out and do it in other ways. These can range from volunteering to workplace mentorship programs to help youth with their homework to hanging out with your lonely neighbor when you have the time. If you think creatively about this, you can make it happen, and you will almost certainly love the result. 

5) Relationships: Community matters. I find in this stage of life, this can be hard. Studies show that in the United States at least, the 20s and early 30s in the United States are on average the second loneliest time in people’s lives (after one’s elderly years) where people have some of the least strong relational connections. High school and college are times when you are surrounded by peers, and after graduating, we are thrust into the world without yet having built the alternative communities that those who are older end up relying on. 

Thus, you must be intentional and sometimes creative to form community. You may have to put yourself out there. Don’t let shyness defeat you. 

What Is the Point of Money?

Many spend their lives acquiring money, but what really is money? 

For many scholars, money is the ability to do something – whether that is to eat a sandwich, own a nice necklace, have someone provide a service for you – turned into a quantified unit. By this definition, money has incredible value. It literally is the ability to do or have things, but there are still some limitations to that value. 

First, the capacity to do what? At the end of the day, money is a tool, a way to meet other goals. Capacity makes a very poor goal or purpose in itself. People who pursue money for money’s sake are attaining the ability to do things without a sense of what they want to do in life in the first place. 

Second, as quantified capacity, money becomes less valuable the more you attain it. Everyone has the capacity to do things with their time and energy. Your salary has a certain amount of capacity as well. When you work, you trade the ability to do whatever it is you could do with your time and energy during that time for the capacity latent in your salary. 

Often, this trade may give us even greater capacity, allowing us to do things we otherwise could not do with the time we have. You can use that capacity to meet your needs and pay for the things that you want, and thus help you live a better life. Such a trade may be worth it for you. 

But after you have so much stored, gaining more may no longer add much value to your life and in some cases, may decrease it. Billionaires, for example, have enough to meet an entire life’s worth of needs and wants (and often the needs and wants of dozens or hundreds of more lives after that). 

In such a situation, they do not have enough time left in their life to enjoy the capacity that they would gain from making more money through work. Each day they work, they lose one more day they have spent doing anything else (spending time with family, relaxing on a beach, or whatever makes one happy). Some ultra wealthy still work because they feel their job gives them a sense of meaning in their lives, but from a certain perspective, they are sacrificing their capacity to keep working. 

Billionaires are an extreme example, but this applies to a certain degree to everyone. There is a time to build a base of capacity for ourselves by earning money, but the more one builds up, the less useful any new money we gain becomes. Eventually, that can switch and trying to attain more money after that is actually counterproductive. 

You should evaluate for yourself how much of this thing called money you truly need and when the money you would gain is no longer worth what you would have to do to get it. 

Life at the Top of the Mountain

“Uh-oh, I see another mountain to climb, / But I got stamina” 

“The Greatest” by Sia
Photo Credit: David Billings

Hollywood often gives its movies satisfactory endings: the villain has been defeated, the world saved, the couple forever in love. But real life rarely works that way. Even after your biggest triumphs in life, there is always a next day when you must go about your regular life again. And then a day after that. And a day after that. Life keeps going (until death), just a continuation of days to get through. 

Our successes may be fantastic at first, but they get absorbed into this continuing cycle of existence. I have spoken with people who think, “If only I would become incredibly wealthy or famous, I would coast for the rest of my life,” as they hustle to make their dreams come true. They try to climb the mountain that they have set before themselves, and some never make it to the top. 

Among those who manage to achieve earth-shattering success, though, you might expect them to coast and live out their dream life, but many in that position successful people keep going for more. Some become used to a more extravagant lifestyle and feel they must climb even further to pay for their increasing expenses; others just seem addicted to the thrill of the climb. Whenever they get to the top of the first mountain, all they see is another even higher mountain behind it. True success, true peace must lie behind at the top of that mountain. 

The writer of Ecclesiastes in the Bible has a different take on success. This is my personal paraphrased summary of what he said: 

“I have had all the types of ‘successes’ in life you could ever think of – money, wealth, fame, power, learning, many wives [a common form of success in his culture for men in particular]. You name it; I’ve had it. I have stood on top of the world; I’ve actually stood on top of many worlds. And what of it? Did these things make me happy at the time? Certainly, but that fades over time, and I must go back to the endless quest of living finding satisfaction each new day.”

I can relate: I have had great accomplishments in life that I am proud of, but what of it? When you finish one mountain, there’s always another mountain to climb. Satisfaction must not come from being at the top. 

I see many people still struggling to climb their mountains, that is, to reach their highest goals in life. Many never get to become what they always hoped and dreamed. They can spend their whole lives climbing their mountain. They can live in ignorance of what it is like to actually make it to the top. It’s often at the top that the harsh winds of the universe hit you the most, and you must make sense of how you will find meaning in it. 

Whether you are in the throes of climbing your mountain or at the top or even about to start your climb, reflecting on what would give you lasting satisfaction in life and why is helpful. What would you do if you obtained your biggest dreams in life, and where would you go from there? And what would be enough that you would be content that you lived a life worth living? You may not be the same person after the climb as before, but by thinking about it now, you can cultivate the introspection to assess what you truly want in life and the strategic thinking to chart how to get there.

 Listening to Your Inner 5-Year Old

Too many adults think that being a healthy, functioning adult requires suppressing their inner child. Our inner child is trying to find a state in which our needs are met, and we should be attune to the child within us and learn from him or her.

This is particularly important when your inner child is throwing a tantrum. Instead of just saying, “No, these feelings are bad; I need to move on from them,” pausing and determining why our inner child is upset may be more beneficial. What need does he or she feel is not being met? Learning about that needs tells you something about yourself and how you are relating to the world around you.

As an adult, you have more tools to decide the best way to meet that need. Needs are very rarely invalid, though, so usually there is a grain of truth to what your inner child is screaming.

Maybe there is a more productive way to meet your needs. To meet their need for attention, little children, for example, may scream and shout in a tantrum, but your adult self may know better, more productive ways to develop relationships that meet one’s need for attention and love. At the same time, as an adult, you can better understand and evaluate why you have a need for attention in the first place: what may be lurking underneath that in your psyche like a loved one you felt betrayed you or whose affections were insincere. From that, you can find a way to work on the root cause at the source.

Little children usually have not developed the ability to do any of this work, but your adult self has more tools to analyze the situation and come out with an appropriate, life-affirming strategy for how to meet your needs. Your adult self also has more tools to advocate for your needs in the world, whether that be constructive conversations with those around you about how you feel or moving into environments that might better meet your needs.

Like a canary in the coal mine, though, your inner child will tell you quickly and persistently that you seem to have an unmet need, often before your adult self realizes it. The two can work together then. Your child to alert you to your unmet needs, and your adult self to diagnose why and come up with an effective way to meet them.  

Spiritual Anxiety and Spiritual Depression

I know some people who have given up on life. They became perplexed at why they should keep doing things when they feel that none of their actions matter in the ultimate sense.

I have also seen other people who go about their day intensely completing tasks as if their life depended on every little small thing on their to-do list. For example, some get caught in their job – in the daily grind of making their presentation or report at work really pop.

The energies of these two people seem like polar opposites – one skeptical, slow, and maybe even despondent, and the other frantic and frenetic. But both types of responses seem to emulate from a similar source: not taking the time to find satisfying meaning in their lives (or find a new source if their previous source of meaning has since broken down).

They are responding in opposite ways to this underlying problem. The first person is exhibiting what I call a depressed spiritual response (not to be confused with emotional depression, though they may be experiencing that too). Overwhelmed by this meaninglessness, they feel like nothing matters.

The second person is trying to satiate their need for meaning by doing more and more. As if that would satisfy them, or at least prevent them having to face their own existential angst.

I call this the anxious spiritual response: the attempt to do more, often trivial things in order to satisfy or avoid finding deeper meaning in life. This is not the same as psychological or emotional anxiety, as it relates more to one’s ability (or inability) to find meaning for one’s life rather than one’s momentary mood or emotional state.

Neither solution is ultimately satisfying, and just like psychological anxiety and depression often occur at the same time, spiritual anxiety and spiritual depression tend to coexist. Despite being opposites, one person may go between them in cycles: building superficial meaning they anxiously hold onto it, only to fall into purposeless depression when it fails. This can become a cycle, where the person consistently rushes towards another vapid way to ground meaning only for what they created to fall apart.

Having either can be a sign that you need to pause and do the work to determine how to effectively build meaning into your life.