We moved to Europe. Not for a vacation. Not for a sabbatical. Not for an adventure, though it is certainly that. We moved because we looked at the life we were building in Los Angeles and decided that the architecture was wrong — that the version of success we were optimizing for wasn't the version we actually wanted when we said it out loud.
The decision took about two years to fully form and about forty-eight hours to execute once it was made. That's usually how the big decisions work. The thinking is slow. The action is fast.
We chose France for reasons that sound romantic and are also practical: the quality of life is genuinely high in ways that matter to us — food, pace, outdoor space, proximity to places we want to take our kids. The tax situation for Americans abroad is complicated and not particularly favorable, and we did that math. We did it anyway.
What we gave up
A network that took twenty years to build. The ability to grab coffee with people who are building interesting things. The casual density of information that comes from being in the right rooms. These are real costs. I'm not pretending they aren't.
What we gained: mornings that belong to us. A pace that makes space for the kids to be bored, which is the precondition for being creative. A default assumption that the day has room in it, rather than that the room has to be fought for. A version of presence that I had been trying to manufacture in the margins of a schedule that didn't actually have margins.
The question wasn't "can we afford to move?" The question was "can we afford not to?" Those are different calculations.
We've been here just over a year. The kids are learning French. We are learning French, more slowly. The light in the south is different than I expected — more varied, more directional. I've started noticing things I didn't have the bandwidth to notice before. I think that's what we came for.