It was never the move. It was what got five minutes closer.
I keep hearing a version of the same story. A new city was going to fix everything, or it did, or it didn’t, and either way the story is told as if the city itself did the work. I think that story is almost always wrong about its own mechanism, even when the person telling it is right that something changed.
Where this ends up: what changes you is not the new place as an idea. It is which things moved inside five or ten minutes of you, and how often that difference actually gets used.
The radius does the work the city gets credit for
Hypothesis Most of what happens in an ordinary week happens inside a small, repeated radius. Coffee, groceries, a park, a friend’s place. People talk about the city they live in as if it were the unit that matters, when the unit that actually touches a Tuesday is closer to a ten-minute walk. Two people in the same city can have almost nothing in common about what is actually reachable from where they sleep.
So “I moved to California” is not a condition. “The ocean is now five minutes away” is a condition. The first is a story. The second is a thing that happens automatically, without willpower, every time leaving the house is easier than not. A person does not decide to become someone who goes to the beach. They live somewhere where going is the path of least resistance, and the going accumulates into a person who goes.
The harder claim: more space can produce a smaller life
Suggestion Here is the one I am less sure of and want to say plainly rather than smuggle in. A bigger house can pull a person inside it. House, car, work, car, house, with the square footage itself absorbing the time that incidental contact used to fill. Meanwhile a smaller home with less to manage can produce more unplanned contact, not because the person is more social, but because there is less to do at home and everything else sits five minutes away instead of forty.
I went looking for research that tests this directly, living space against incidental daily contact, holding a person constant. I did not find one. What exists on homes and behaviour mostly was not measured in homes at all, and the one study I found that was run in real houses was funded by the company selling what it tested (the full account is here). So this is not a finding. It is a hypothesis I think is worth taking seriously, and an honest gap in what anyone actually knows.
What this means for a move already made, or one being considered
Hypothesis If the mechanism is proximity rather than narrative, the practical question changes. Not will this place make me a new person, which is close to unanswerable and invites a story assembled after the fact to explain whatever happened. Instead: what is currently far that would be close, and would I actually use it. A gym across town and a gym downstairs are not the same condition wearing different addresses. One gets used. The other becomes a subscription.
This is the same argument as my own before-and-after notes on returning to a place I used to live. The interesting question was never whether the place would make me feel like my old self again. It was which specific conditions had changed, and which were still sitting there, unchanged, waiting to be walked back into.
Where this stops. The radius argument is reasoning, not a cited finding, though it fits the same shape as evidence I already have on repeated daily conditions mattering more than large infrequent ones. The space-versus-contact claim is a real hypothesis with no research behind it that I could find, and I am labelling it that way rather than dressing it up.
What I am not saying. That everyone would be happier in a smaller apartment, or that moving cannot matter. Only that when it does matter, the honest explanation is usually a specific proximity, not the place as a whole.