Moving to New Zealand
The end of 2022 and 2023 has been a big shift in life
For the first time instead of living year by year, by moving to New Zealand Lyss and I are planning on this being a longer term home ideally for 5-10+ year and thinking that way has changed both of us.
Last rounds of nomading
The end of 2022 and beginning of 2023 were the last stretches of our nomading years with just month long trips in both Hong Kong for a few family weddings on my side and then six weeks in Australia for Christmas and the birth of Lyss' sister's second child.
While it would have been nice to have spent that time nomading in other countries, these events only happen once in life and so especially for my sister's engagement party and Lyss' niece so it was quite meaningful to actually be there.
At the same time, being at home for each of us respectively brings about a lot of logistics between meeting friends and family while trying to juggle ongoing work stuff and by the end of it, both Lyss and I were ready to settle down somewhere for the longer term, put roots down and create something that was truly ours.
It's not to say that we won't travel or spent time abroad again in the future, but I imagine it'd be different. Having established roots here in New Zealand now with our own place, furniture, cars and a routine, there's something quite nice about having all this set up and so in future it'd be nice to return to something that we can truly call home.
Logistics of moving
With all that said and done, moving somewhere for good requires a lot more work than just going there for 90 days, living out of an Airbnb.
Between finding a place, spending a bunch of money furnishing it, buying cars and sorting out visas, it's weird to think that what most people take for granted actually requires a ton of effort to make happen. I guess the difference being these things typically happen over a multi-year period whereas for Lyss and I it only happened within 4-6 weeks of being here.
Without having control of our own schedules, I have no idea how all this could have happened, so major props to anybody who has emigrated to a new country and sucessfully settled down, especially if they did it in a second language.
Identity shift
All those decisions of course entail a certain identity shift that I suspect gets underappreciated. Just through sheer spending $10k+ on a bunch of furniture here means we're invested in Christchurch and I've noticed that changes in the small patterns of thinking.
Where when nomading, our dopamine hits would come from things like going to a new area or weekend trip, at least so far there we can definitely feel the pull of consumerism and just buying a ton of stuff. Hopefully it's just in the beginning phase where we're settling in that requires so this many purchases, but I'm wary of it becoming a longer term habit.
On the positive side though, it also means a renewed focus on self-development and exploration. I'm a big fan of the idea that a person can only absorb so many "new" things in life. And so if you're constantly going to "new" sites, sounds or even meeting new people, the opportunity cost is exploring new thing internally. The best example I have of this is trying to learn to code last year while nomading. Learning something new just requires too much effort, and when dopamine receptors are firing because of traveling instead of because of learning new hard things, it just makes learning all the more difficult.
Given all of the above, it'll be interesting to see how Christchurch as a new environment affects me and Lyss. As a small town and we're living on the relative outskirts, we're already seeing a lot less people on a daily basis than we did living in Hong Kong or Melbourne and so far it's been quite pleasant. With that said, it's also come with challenges. One of the perks I originally thought would happen by living somewhere longer term would be finding a football team and playing regularly. So far though having played with two teams, between the challenges of registering as a foreigner as well as just not finding the right team in general, it hasn't happened and so now have to think through whether it's worth even investing time and energy in this area of life.
Conclusion
All in all it's been an interesting transition to a new phase of life, it's still early days but we like Christchurch quite a bit and so we'll see how it plays out in the long run.