You Are Where You Live
How Cities Quietly Shape our Identity, Ambitions, and Way of Seeing the World.
It has been five months since I came back to the city so called tropical paradise — Bangkok.
And it has begun to consume me again.
My relationship with this city is ‘a place that bombards me with social-class comparison, status anxiety, the materialist game.’ And no matter how much I want to break free by sprinting to the top — so that those factors affect me no longer — it feels like swimming in a closed pond. Domestically capped. No hope of breaking through. No way of becoming the person I want to be from inside it.
The lens the city forces me to adopt is that of a player in a never-ending game that was somewhat rigged from the start.
However, earlier this year, between January and March — the late winter of Europe — I was in Milan. I visited Vienna. A day trip to Rimini. Portofino. And my mind, somehow, operated differently. I began to see the world, and to hold a different relationship with the environment around me, in a way I never had before.
I still remember the first moment I dropped my luggage at an apartment on Via Pasquale Sottocorno. Putting on my black tailored Prada jacket, a cashmere Renoma scarf, a camel overcoat — and walking into the heart of the city, through San Babila to Via Montenapoleone.
The more I walked that same route, week by week, the more something shifted. By the time I flew back to Bangkok in March, I was able to see this metropolis differently for the first time.
Suddenly the walk along Bangkok affluent area like Langsuan Road or Central Embassy — a place that contained every archetype I used to feel inferior to — no longer produced that feeling.
I began to see clearly the concrete objectivity behind status anxiety. To see through the illusion of luxury and consumption, which suddenly seemed insignificant in magnitude compared to Montenapoleone.
The entire six weeks in the heart of Lombardy—even in a role far removed from the typical “local habitat”—was far from the experience of a typical tourist or a fleeting visitor, content to soak up the romance, indulge in the finer things, and leave without ever seeing the place’s raw nature.
It was a period of cultural immersion, experienced through the eyes of an observer at its finest.
Then almost half a year passed.
And with my mind, my body, and my spirit placed back inside the very same apartment, the same destinations, the same tempo of life I have known for over two decades — the very same programming has installed itself into me again.
The same old perspective. Player rather than observer.
That is what is currently inside me.
Which leads to this dispatch. On how a city — I may argue — dictates one’s life trajectory more than any other factor ever will.
And if you are able to fully accept that, and then do something about it, a pathway toward a great life may be closer than it was before.
