Staring Out My Window at the City Below

Staring out my window at the city below, I often think how amazing it is that so many people from so many other places decided to move here, and that so many people from this place decided to stay here.

There are now millions of people here.

What’s so special about here?

My here is like so many other heres. Travel up the coast, you’ll see plenty of places where a city could have grown, but didn’t. Those places look a lot like this place, back before the people came.

I’m sure there are many good reasons why people came here, but I’m also sure there are also bad reasons why people came here. Some of these reasons may have been better there than here. No place is perfect, all have their drawbacks, on balance it’s really hard to say one raw piece of coastal land is better or worse than another raw piece of coastal land.

Yet they all came here. Why here?

At some point, probably very early in the process, people started coming here and staying here primarily because other people were coming and staying here. This positive feedback loop may be the most powerful reason why millions of people decide to move to, and stay in, a particular place. As more move and stay, even more move and stay.

And when this happens at a time of dramatic increases in overall population, it’s like city growth on steroids.

This city creation force has been so powerful, it feels permanent. But it isn’t. Cities die. We know this from archeology and history, and we can visit Detroit and see a city in the process of dying.

People leave, which causes more people to leave, which causes even more people to leave. Sometime this city destruction force is more powerful than the city creation force, quickly unwinding centuries of creation. Other times it’s a slow aging process, as a city stops growing but its people (mostly) stay put.

By most accounts, the world’s dramatic population growth over the last century is slowing, and soon will stop. In my lifetime it will start declining.

What this will mean for my city is not clear. On one hand, I expect people will continue to want to live where other people live, so the dynamic that led to the creation of the city will continue. But on the other hand, so much of the vibrancy we associate with a healthy city is, in reality, that city’s success at replenishing and growing its ranks. As more and more of our cities find their ranks shrinking, how will that effect their vitality?

I’m not contemplating anything on the magnitude of Rome c. 100 turning into Rome c. 650, but I do sense that a lot of my world view has been constructed on top of an assumption that there will always be ever more people here. That’s how it’s been, but that’s not how it will be.

How will this change things? The realtor’s cliché “They’re not making more land” will no longer be true, for once we’re no longer making more people we will, in effect, be making more land as that which had been occupied is left vacant.

A lot else will change too, but staring out my window at the teeming multitudes below, I’m having a hard time getting my head around this future reality. All I can think is how amazing it is that so many decided to be here now.

Routine

I have a complicated relationship with routine.

On one hand, I fear and fight routine. It is anesthetizing. It puts my brain on autopilot. Day after day of the same old same old until I descend into senescence—that’s no life for me! Particularly when you consider that time flies faster when you’re in a routine, so if you want your life to feel shorter, by all means fill it with routine. To resist this I try to vary what I do, just by a little, breaking things up enough to force me to pay attention.

On the other hand, I have a grudging respect for routine, and I believe there are good reasons why we so often seem to prefer it. There are things I would prefer to handle on autopilot. I don’t want to think anew about everything I do. Breakfast, for example, should never be an adventure. Stepping outside our comfort zones can be rewarding, but it is also stressful. Routine can be so soothing, even palliative, particularly at times when everything else seems to be going awry.

Through my life I’ve careened back and forth between two extremes: sometimes feeling like I can get through my days without ever turning my mind on, my life having become so filled with, and governed by, routine, then other times feeling like my life is wildly out of control, completely unmoored from routine. When I wake up from the former, I send my life spinning into the latter, which in turns seems to send me back to the former, and so on.

I guess that’s sort of a routine in itself.

My current plan is to balance the two, embracing routine even more tightly where I don’t care enough to think, and rejecting routine even more thoroughly where I do care enough to think. My hope is that by nourishing that part of my mind that craves routine, I will find it easier to avoid falling into routine in areas where I’d rather stay awake.

Embracing routine is the easier part, as I find my mind naturally gravitates towards routine, but still it has been a bit challenging. So, for instance, I’ve decided I don’t want to think about what to wear in the morning, so my ultimate goal is to wear the same thing everyday, but my wife thinks this is completely insane and, were I to actually do this, I think others would feel the same. Similarly, I would prefer to eat the same thing everyday for breakfast and lunch, but I find myself in situations, such as going out to lunch socially, where that isn’t possible.

Rejecting routine has been harder. When I determined to toss aside my old music listening habits and listen to completely new music, it was wrenching at first because I still liked my old music. I soon found new music I liked, but that just led to new music listening habits. Similarly, I tried to break out of a rut in my reading but soon found myself in a new rut as I started mining a different vein. At work I sought out projects in unfamiliar areas, figuring it would be stressful but I’d get my neurons firing in new ways. Once I found some success in these new areas, though, people started sending me similar projects, and I accepted them, motivated, I must admit, by a desire to avoid the stress of the new.

So my record is decidedly mixed. The lure of routine is difficult to resist. While I toy with extreme ideas to break free from routine, such as quitting my job and living out of an RV while traveling the country working odd jobs, these, I fear, are just idle dreams of one already well down the slippery slope of routine.