HUMANS 101

You Should Move to a Random City for 2 Years

It’ll help you figure out who you are

Eve Peyser
Human Parts
Published in
5 min readAug 17, 2022

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Movers with a moving truck in Brooklyn
Photo by Handiwork NYC on Unsplash

I have a recommendation for any rootless millennial and Gen Zer who does remote work: move to a random city for a few years. I’d especially urge you to do this if you currently live in a very expensive major metropolis like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco. This isn’t about finding somewhere cheaper, exactly, though where I moved certainly was. It’s about opening yourself up to possibilities beyond the false scripts you’ve been presented with. No matter where you live, you’re still you, but moving to somewhere kinda arbitrary, a place you’d never expect to end up in, will teach you surprising things about who you are and what’s important in life.

I was born and raised in Manhattan, and aside from the six semesters I spent in Ohio, a place where I swiftly earned my college degree and then got the hell out of there, I always lived in New York City and expected that I would forever. It felt like my destiny, like it was the only place I was allowed to live. I was a writer after all, and that meant I had to be in a cultural center. And I lacked the skills to live elsewhere (primarily a driver’s license).

Don’t get me wrong, I love New York, I will always love New York, and it will always be home to me, but…

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Eve Peyser
Eve Peyser

Written by Eve Peyser

nyc native living in the pnw. read my writing in the new york times, nymag, vice, and more.