In college, I got some career advice about that I really like. I don’t know if it’s good advice (I have yet to take it), but it sounds like good advice. I was whining to a post-doc that I no idea what I wanted to do with my life. She told me that if I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I should focus on a city I wanted to live in, and find a job that would allow me to live there. Of course all advice is autobiographical, and in this case, the autobio followed free-of-charge. After working for a while out of college, she decided she wanted to live in London, so she went and got a Masters in Political Science at UCL. And that decision would eventually lead her to getting a PhD and giving life advice to aimless Sophomores. So I guess it worked out for her.

When I think about it, I find it hard to imagine it not working out for someone. It seems sort of like self-fulfilling advice in that way. Like, if you take it, you’ll probably be able to look back on it as a good decision or at least a good experience. This is as opposed to specific advice like “start a small business” or “go to grad school”. There are plenty of people (who don’t know what to do) who wouldn’t benefit at all from going back to school and don’t need to try to find out. On the other hand, when you move to a new city, you are very likely to learn new things about yourself and encounter more opportunities than you would have just sitting in your room. To shamelessly hijack a great analogy, if you don’t know what to do with your life, it’s very easy to sit on the ground and watch figs rot on the tree. So if you can’t tell which fig is the juiciest from the ground, the best thing may be to pick one that looks pretty good and start climbing towards it. Once you get there, you may see figs that you couldn’t see from the ground. At risk of wearing this metaphor out, even if you fall back to the ground, at least you’ve eaten one fig and gotten a little better at climbing.

In fact, I think the advice is a way of forcing a career decision while simultaneously removing a lot of the pressure. On one level, narrowing job choice to one city might make it easier to find and settle on a “good enough” job the same way its easier to choose a pasta sauce at ALDI than somewhere with 100 options. Or the way setting constraints can sometimes alleviate writer’s block. I think an important point to make here is that you can still choose between white and red sauce. That is, although the search space may be constrained, most jobs exist in most cities, and you should be able to find a job that you think you might like and that will guide your future decisions. To use my friend as an example, she wouldn’t have moved to London and gone into construction (I imagine). Political science was in her wheelhouse, and she thought she’d enjoy the program even if she didn’t continue on to a PhD.

I’m actually going to pause here and compare this to what I think of as the default path for moderately ambitious American college graduates because it may elucidate the advantages of taking my friend’s advice. I would say that, more often than not, college graduates don’t know what they really want to do. They pick some field based on their aptitudes and what’s normal for people in their family. Depending on their ambition this could be anything from consulting or engineering to med or grad school. They pick a field or two, cast a wide net, and end up moving wherever they get their best (or more likely first) offer. The result of this process is that they’ve ended up doing work they think they’re supposed to love (or like) (or at least be good at) in a city that, as often as not, they don’t care for.

If they do like their work, that’s great. Then, even if they don’t like the city, they can later find a similar job in another city they prefer. If they don’t like the work, that’s a bit worse. They’ve just built their whole little life in a new city around their work that was supposed to be somewhere between a the only thing they are qualified to do and their calling, and now it turns out they don’t like it. That’s a bit harder to fix than just moving to a new city.

Compare to my friend’s advice. You research different cities, find one you like, then find an acceptable job there. It may not be the best of most prestigious firm, but at least there’s great public transit and live music and weather (a perennially underrated factor in my opinion). Now there’s more of a balance between your life and work. A work-life balance, if you will. If you hate your job, that’s fine, good thing it’s not such a big part of your identity. Makes it easier to dodge the bullet. If it turns out you don’t like live music as much as you thought you would, that’s fine too. You can move. Of course I’m eliding over a lot of friction and costs to each of these moves, but I think comparatively it’s better on the whole.

In a way, it’s a ridiculous piece of advice. If humans were smarter (or stupider) they would realize that choosing a city is as difficult and involves as much imperfect / asymmetric information as choosing a job. It’s impossible to make a fully informed decision about them without trying them out. The thing is we’ll all just agreed that one of those decisions matters much more than the other, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a good balance.

Appendix

And now I’m going to abruptly and clumsily transition to an appendix. This may not be as closely related to the post as it appears, but I wanted somewhere to put it. I’ve recently become interested in different people’s advice about what city you should live in. No reason. So I’m going to collect those here. (Get ready. This is interactive.) So if you’ve read something interesting about this or if you have your own take that I should consider, please send it my way. In no particular order:

I actually agree with Paul Graham here for the most part. I might take issue with some of his characterizations of specific cities, and in general I think it matters more where you live within a city. But I do think that your community and milieu (read: bubble) have a large impact on your worldview, goals, values etc. so it’s worth taking into account when making a decision.

During my bimonthly financial health panic, I stumbled across this old post from Mr. Money Mustache that’s more than ten years old. It mainly talks about leaving your birthplace to go live somewhere cheaper with more natural beauty. He clearly has his likes (and dislike). The heart of it can be applied pretty universally. Try to live in the cheapest place that has the stuff you like a city to have. Hard to argue with once I change his point into my point. He also links to this tool for following his advice. It’s fun to mess with, but I think it’s value comes in the form of introducing you to mid-sized cities that you probably wouldn’t otherwise consider. Then you can do your real research elsewhere.

I’m not above the occasional Buzzfeed quiz. Especially when it’s made by the New York Times. I say that only a little in jest. I don’t know how they expect people to use this, but I kept toggling things until I got the cities I already wanted. Maybe it’s just me, but the criteria seem all over the place. Trees, Commute, Health care. Say less.