Sometimes it can happen, depending on your lifestyle. I work in tech and live alone. I come from a rural town of 7000 people. When I was a teenager in the 90ies, I wanted to live in a group of towers of a trendy neighborhood in my province’s biggest city. They are connected to an underground mall with a grocery store, a cinema, a pharmacy, multiple restaurants, etc… To me it seemed prestigious and useful to be able to live in a place without going outside for errands.

Ten years later I moved into that city but in a peripheral neighborhood. Then another few years later, I needed to move again and ended up in a tower near the ones I wanted to live in when I was a teenager. I didn’t even realize it at first. I just needed a place to live. But one day while coming back from the grocery store and exiting the tower complex, I realized that I wanted to live there twenty odd years ago, and now I go shop there while living two streets away.

But now that I traveled a bit more in the recent years, there are other places in the world where I have this feeling of “I could/I want to live there” and I know it’s probably not going to be possible. Also, as nice and tempting as other countries and cities are, it’s already not easy to find a place to live in your own country right now, let alone in a desirable neighborhood of another country.

The one at work forces me to use Windows and Teams. The one at home lets me tinker with open soirce and gives me the freedom to do what I want.