Moving out: How to think about it
If you’re new to the rights of passage that is moving out; you might be, like I was, particularly annoyed about how little media there is to help you make sense of the experience. Sure, there’s tons of resources with tips and tricks to help you with the “doing” part of starting life on your own — find a flatmate, budget your finances, call your parents — yet very little to help you with the “thinking” part. Moving out is an expansive paradigm shift that changes everything about your day-to-day, necessitating some rethinking about the way you consider the world and your place in it. This piece offers some insight on what to factor in to that process.
People move out of home for a variety of reasons; most typically, for study or work. Lets call this reason your “primary commitment”. Your primary commitment usually demands the move, but more importantly, is the thing that occupies most of your day. Regardless of your primary commitment, you are probably leaving a typical , average life and family, whatever that means. For the average person, life prior to moving out likely involved certain routine — wake, go to school, get home, eat supper, sleep.
Of course its wildly more complex than that and each person would have their own version of the grind. But on the macro, life sort of kept us each repeating some daily mantra.
Crucially, how you went about checking off the to-do list is often well and pre-defined during childhood. You get to school by walking there or hopping into a car or bus. If you walked, you likely already knew the safest route there, because other people, perhaps friends, walked that way too. If your parents drove you they would determine the time you needed to leave, ensured the car was fueled and did the driving. If you took some other transport, it was likely that the transport ran the same route every day, probably before you even started at that school, so it only made sense to use. Perhaps it was arranged and paid for by your caregivers. Daily micro-actions were well and pre-defined. Most people never have to dedicate significant brainpower to consider the routine. It was there, it worked well, and you used it.
Moving out completely shifts that. Daily activities may change slightly — wake, go to college or work, get home, eat some supper, sleep. But now you are suddenly responsible for your own “how’s”. Getting to college is now a task. You must consider the best route that ensures you get there on time; which means you need to schedule your day; which means you need to stay abreast with the expectation of all your daily commitments. You need to consider the affordability of the transport fare, which factors in, at the very least, both the cost of different transport options against your available pool of money, and the safety and reliability of the transport service. There is a pervasive list of new requirements that is suddenly thrust upon thee. And that, is significantly taxing. Sarah Godfrey notes that “The emotional impact of moving is in the top 5 most stressful situations we experience across a lifespan, it’s up there with divorce.”
Suddenly, there is chaos. You need to handle a lot more than you’re used to handling. And often times, you have no idea where to start. The mantra of the self help philosophy is often to figure out how to do the thing. Not why the thing must be done. We know that the sudden and intense paradigm shift caused chaos; but productivity hacks and lifestyle design can often be superficial symptomatic fixes if not paired with a grounded understanding of the root problem that they are trying to patch.
You lost all the brownie points with Maslow
When you move out, you will find that you have dropped all the way down on Maslows Hierarchy of Needs.
Abraham Maslow suggested that our actions are motivated by the requirement to meet each category of need in his hierarchy, progressively. That is to say, one’s attention is unlikely to be diverted to meeting a need on a higher level of the hierarchy if a need on a lower level is not already satisfactorily met.
For the first portion of our lives, our families and in some societies, our communities, have an obligation to meet the first two layers of needs. And in most cases, our families will try to meet the third layer as well. This means that you probably grew up without giving too much thought to the three most foundational requirements of human existence. Effort was made by others to provide you with enough material resources to survive, safety and love. There was eighteen-odd years to work on more psychological and personal needs. There would have been freedom to spend time figuring out an identity, preferences, desires. You could work on your personal image, had time to garner social capital on the playground, and grow your belief in yourself.
Admittedly, there is a significant portion of people who would read the above as the utopic childhood of the middle class. Granted. But where the examples fail to relate across social boundaries, the principle — that young people don’t have to work to satisfy their basic needs exclusively on their own — is true of the majority.
Cue the move. The emotional goodbyes at driveway gates or airports. The resulting culture shock. The resultant feeling of dread when you realise you have to manage a home. Nightmarish scenes of laundry detergent staining favourite t-shirts, Saturdays wasted on mopping floors, the realisation that no matter how much you budget, you just Cant. Stop. Spending. Money. On. Food.
Moving out of an established home into one that you’re yet to build comes with a range of interesting adventures (to be read “dreaded challenges”). Why? You are suddenly booted to the ground of Maslows Hierarchy. Your most basic needs are not being automatically met. You have to consider what you need, what would meet them, and how you are going to acquire those things.
Consequentially, your limited capacity must now be dedicated to the pursuit of the lower level needs. Human beings have limited capacity — a physical energy quota in need of insatiable refueling, emotional rigor that’s constantly under strain and finite mental rations that can only do so much — “Self-resources” if you will. Moving out redirects these already limited self-resources to two simultaneous pursuits: Both the acquisition of lower level needs and actually “doing the work” at your primary commitment . You don’t just have to contend with academic deadlines or work stress; you also have to make heaps of decisions about accessary ‘life stuff”. Decisions that require information. Information that you have to research, ask for advice on, and do the mentally taxing work of, god forbid, coming to a definitive conclusion on.
This necessarily means that you can no longer focus on higher order needs like self actualisation, as much as you used to. There isn’t enough time and energy to spend on the things that you were spending your entire life on previously.
Recognising the root cause of the chaos is the first step towards figuring it all out. Then you have to actually figure out means to disentangle the chaos. How do you gradually enlargen your capacity to handle the life stuff whilst still dedicating enough self-resources to your primary commitment? That takes time and significant personal investment to figure out.
Some people try productivity hacks, resort to YouTube videos on how to boil eggs, start meditating for the first time in their lives. Everyone figures this out differently.
Crucially, you have to actively work on figuring it out. Recognise that because you never spent considerable time working these things out previously, you’re probably very bad at it. And it will suck. It is an entire earth-sized playground and you’re the new kid on the block. Perhaps a varied version of old wisdom that my sister often used, could offer some motivation:
“The only way to get through it; is to get to it”.