Where Do You Want To Live?
A step-by-step guide to help you decide.
Did you just turn 18 and are looking to move out and spread your wings out to the world? Graduated from university and trying to decide on where to live? Or is a dreamy kid more accurate?
Either way, there are over 10000 cities in the world, so making that choice is hard.
Or at least, making the right choice is.
I mean, there are so many factors to take into consideration, and keeping up with all of them comes with great difficulty.
But don’t worry, I’ve come up with a simple framework to help you make a responsible decision that would make the most sense to you and your needs.
Let’s get into it!
Factors To Consider:
Climate
Climate greatly affects lifestyle — from expenses, to activities you can carry out, to overall physical and mental health. It’s definitely a factor to take into consideration.
Okay, but what about climate? BE MORE PRECISEEE!!
Right. There are a couple of pieces you could look into in terms of climate. Particularly, look at the temperatures, temperature range, precipitation levels and precipitation range. It’s pretty simple:
Temperatures: Look at the average temperatures throughout the year, are they cold or hot overall? Mild?
Temperature ranges: Look at the difference between the highest averages and the lowest ones, how big is it of a difference?
What is the difference between temperatures and temperature ranges?
Good question! It’s essentially that temperatures tell you how hot or how cold you should expect to live in, while the range helps you estimate how much adaptations and changes you need to make throughout seasons. For example, a city could have temperatures ranging from 5 to 45 degrees in a year, and another could have temperatures ranging from -20 to 20 — the range is equivalent but one is way hotter than the other.
Precipitation levels: it’s essentially the average amount of rain, snow, sleet, or hail that an area receives throughout the year. Is it wet, dry or moderate?
Precipitation ranges: Similar to temperature ranges, it expresses the difference between the wettest average and the driest average.
Difference?
Pretty much the same as the difference between temperatures and temperature ranges. Precipitation levels expresses how wet or dry a region is overall, but the range expresses the significance of precipitation level changes throughout the year.
Why does climate matter?
Essentially, climate matters for a lot of things, and correlates with the majority of human activity patterns — whether directly or indirectly. Some of the direct factors include:
→ Physical health: The climate of a region can have a direct impact on one’s physical health. For example, it can trigger some skin or respiratory conditions, or it can lead to a lack of certain vitamins…
→ Mental health: The climate of a region can also have a direct impact on one’s mental health. For example, an extremely cold climate can often lead to patterns of loneliness, depression…
→ Activities: There are some activities that highly depend on the climate to determine whether or not they can be carried out. For example, if ski matters to you, you might not want to go around a tropical climate for long.
Opportunities
Another factor to consider when deciding on a location to live is the availability of opportunities.
Would you be able to find a decent job? How difficult would it be to find it?
That is determined by a few more factors… You need to consider the presence of an industry in locations. For example, if you’re a founder or executive, you would want to consider an economically important city such as Toronto or Vancouver. You just can’t go to a small town because that’s not where you’ll find new opportunities.
This factor also gets a little more complicated with multiple people. A couple would need to consider opportunities for 2 people. A family of four would need to consider opportunities for each of the parents and the kids — opportunities for kids would include education, extra-curricular activities, summer jobs/internships…
On the other hand, there is also a phenomenon that can simplify this factor — working/studying from home. It’s become accepted as normal thanks to the global pandemic. If you’re able to do that — and willing to — you’re no longer bound by the availability of opportunities in a given location.
NOTE: Don’t forget to include any special needs, such as the availability of specific products or services you need.
Quality of Life
We’ve worried about opportunities and climate. Now time to worry about another VERY important factor…
Quality of Life.
What do you mean by that?
For the purpose if this article, I will explore 4 distinct points from quality of life:
→ Access to resources: Does the area you’re considering have resource you would need to fulfill your needs? Electricity power, water,
→ Pollution: Quality of air is something you should worry about — highly polluted air can have severe consequences later on like skin and respiratory conditions. Same goes for quality of water — it has huge effects on your life, for the better or the worse…
→ Cost of life: What is the average salary around the area you’re considering? How much would you need to live comfortable? Any extra expenses specific to that area — eg heating & seasonal tires in Canada.
→ Comfort: Would you be willing to live in the suburbs or a few miles out of the city for a more comfortable home?
People
Never completely ignore people from your list of factors.
What do you mean by people?
That’s a great question. I would say a couple of things:
Population: How many people live in a given location matters. It can affect parts of our days we need to deal with daily. If a city is too crowded, think about problem like traffic. If it’s few people, things could be calm and boring — something an extroverted person might not be too fond of. Population overlaps perhaps better with economic components, it plays in for things like offer and demand…
Culture: What do I care? YOU DO — or at least, YOU SHOULD. Consider crime rates in cities you’re looking into — or more specifically, look at neighborhoods. What kind of people live there? What can affect my relationships with the people around me?
Language: Like it or not, language will affect your life for the better or the worse. Are you willing to struggle for a few months to learn the local language, or do you insist on a location with a language you already speak?
Friends/family: Do you have family members or friends you might want to stay close with? Or do you want to risk it all and explore a whole new place, far away from the safety net that your loved ones would provide?
Politics
How is the government doing? Are they too conservative or too liberal? Do they protect basic human rights? Will you have any issues if you’re a minority member? Can you have religious freedom?
If it’s a completely new country, think about the process to move. How long would it take you to become a citizen? How hard is it to obtain permanent residence/visa papers.
Does the government often make poor decisions that lead up to violent riots and disruption in the country?
How does that differ from people?
People and politics are often correlated. However, politics in a country do not necessarily represent its people.
Now What?
Right.
To decide on a location, you can’t look at the map and randomly select cities “that you feel like they comply to your criteria”… You need a strategy — Here is a step-by-step sample strategy you use to do it:
- Write all you criteria down (digital or paper works, writing in your mind doesn’t 😉).
- Prioritize the criteria: it’s near impossible to satisfy the criteria for EVERY. SINGLE. FACTOR. listed above… Therefore, you need to determine which are more important in order to be most efficient.
- Start by eliminating the absolute NOs: There are surely some places that do not comply with your top criteria, cross them off.
- More elimination — go through all options again and eliminate more.
- When you have a few options left, go ahead and make a pros/cons t-chart.
- Select the top 5 ones.
- Do more research on the top 5, select the top 2.
- Look for arrangement to move to bother your top 2 places, once you have them both, feel fee to pick which one suits you best 😎
Conclusion
So how did the process go? Was it smooth? Lengthy? Inefficient? Exhausting?
I mean you didn’t expect it to be a piece of cake, or did you?
Finally, what location did you end up going for? Let me know in a response
Overall, I got myself to translate my geography class material into an article to help strengthen my understanding and content-creation muscle… (well, also to make Geography class slightly more interesting and enjoyable). It’s definitely something I need to work on, stay tuned for more articles of the sort!! 😉
If you’ve come this far, thank you for reading! If you enjoyed it, feel free to follow my journey on Twitter @linamaach, on LinkedIn, and subscribe to my personal newsletter to get monthly updates about what an ambitious teenager is up to!
