When I was 18 years old, I moved from the suburbs of Toronto to Waterloo, Ontario, which is about an hour west of the city.
I largely did this for two reasons.
Firstly, I had started visiting friends at both Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo while I was in high school, and I thought that I wanted that kind of University town experience.
Secondly, I started University as a Computer Science student and I figured that Waterloo was a pretty good place to study that. Research In Motion (later renamed to Blackberry) was an important company at the time and interesting things were happening.
Though to be clear, I was a student at Laurier and not at the University of Waterloo – the better of the two schools for Computer Science – because I didn’t have the grades for the latter.
But a funny thing ended up happening. I hated living in Waterloo. I felt so out of place. So much so that I spent every weekend back in Toronto visiting my friends who had instead decided to go to the University of Toronto.
And I remember vividly how I felt during those weekends. I would stand in my friend’s apartments – most of which had dens and solariums that were hacked into bedrooms so that they could afford to live there – and I would look across the skyline and think to myself: why the hell do I not live here?
So I transferred to the University of Toronto. And that solved that.
The reason I bring up this story today is that I was reminded of it while reading a recent CityLab article by Richard Florida called, The Self-Confident City .
The three main arguments in the article are:
(1) Where we choose to live has a massive impact on our life outcomes.
(2) Self-confident people – according to a recent study – seem to be drawn to big cities.
(3) Self-confidence can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy for people in big cities.
Now, I don’t know if it was really self-confidence and youthful hubris that told me I needed to live in a bigger city than Waterloo. (It was probably part of it.) All I know is that I wanted to live in a super dynamic place that felt bigger than me. I wanted to feel like I was a small fish in a big pond trying to make some sort of meaningful dent.
That was true for me when I was 18. And it remains true for me today at 32.