Learning to Stop Building a Bigger Life

For most of my adult life, I've been expanding. New countries, new languages, new circles, new versions of myself. From China to the US to the Netherlands. Each move came with the same instinct: look outward, observe, adapt, try to belong. Build a life in the new place. Build it bigger than the last one.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. When you move to a new country, it's a very human response. You want to understand how people live, and you think maybe if you adopt some of those ways of living, the place will eventually feel natural to you.

But at some point, I realized that trying to belong can slowly become a project in itself. Not because anyone is asking you to do it, but because you start believing that there is a correct way to live wherever you are. A correct level of sociability, number of friends to have; how to spend your weekends, how much activity your life should contain.

After a year in the Netherlands, I stopped feeling interested in that project. I no longer feel the need to reshape myself in order to fit in. I no longer want to spend energy maintaining an image of what my life should look like.

I've started to accept something that feels surprisingly freeing: it's okay if my life looks very different from people my age. My background has never been average. I've moved across countries, across cultures, and across different versions of myself. Perhaps I was never meant to fit neatly into one template.

Lately, I've also been noticing that I genuinely enjoy a simple and focused life. I don't need to fill my schedule with commitments, or actively maintain a large social network, or carry everyone's emotions. I have many small things that make me feel full. Going for a walk, running, writing, taking photos, watching birds, learning something new, spending time with my own thoughts.

The older I get, the more I realize that this might actually be a talent. I can find endless interest in ordinary things. I can spend hours with something simple and never feel deprived. For a long time, I thought this was because I wasn't outgoing enough. Now I think it's because my brain works differently.

I've noticed that the more I simplify my life, the more creative I become. The less noise there is, the more ideas appear. The fewer obligations I carry, the more energy I have. It's almost as if creativity, for me, doesn't come from adding things to my life. It comes from removing things that aren't essential.

Recently, I came across a post about treating your life as a piece of art, continuously refining yourself, fixing your internal bugs, building a stronger system. A year ago, I probably would have deeply resonated with it. Today, I still do, but in a different way. I don't think I want to spend the rest of my life endlessly optimizing myself. I don't want to treat myself as a project anymore. I want to treat myself as a life.

I'm no longer waiting for a group of people to tell me what the right way to live is. I'm willing to take responsibility for the consequences of my own choices. I'm no longer outsourcing the definition of a good life to other people. I'm reclaiming the right to define it for myself.

I guess this is simply about becoming quieter. After years of expanding, learning to contract. Less noise, less proving, less maintenance, and more space.

I used to think I needed a bigger life. Now I think I just need a clearer one.