There’s no way to actually know what it’s like to live somewhere unless you actually live there. Maybe you cross that line when you sign a lease, or when you buy furniture. I’m not sure. But the point is, you need to settle down to know a place. The longer you live there, the more you realize how little you actually know about the place and the people, and how many assumptions you’d made because you thought you know or you wanted to know. After spending 1.5 years in Hong Kong, I got to know myself and where my family came from a little better, but I can’t imagine saying that I know Hong Kong itself that well. The same goes for NYC, where I’ve lived for almost a year now.

Your commitments will follow you wherever you live, but not where you visit. Living requires maintenance, whereas visits don’t. So while you can skip the gym for a week or hire a sitter for your cat, you don’t really get to do that when you actually move somewhere. When I visited New York City several times in the 2010s, I would tag along on my friend’s business trips or stay with another friend (sometimes both). My friends’ generosity shielded me from the financial pressures of Manhattan. 

Living somewhere is more magical and ordinary than you’d think. During my first trips to NYC, I wanted to do as much NYC stuff as I could. I did business meetings at the library bar at the NoMad. I bought my first necklace from A$AP Eva. I visited as many magazine shops as I could. But there is no way that I could do it all in a visit—since living here, with much less effort, I’ve done a lot more, but I’m also not doing that every day. As a modification of the bolded statement, the magical things feel like the most ordinary ones too. I was shopping in Soho one cloudy day and coming out of the store to sunshine, and realizing I didn’t need to take the subway—I had enough time to walk to the place where I was meeting a friend. It was a great day.