Two summers ago at dinner with friends, the following conversation topic came up: Are you the same person you were a year ago?

We went around the table describing who we were in high school, then college, reflecting on who we were in the present. We concluded that <1yr post-grad was likely too short of a time period to accurately recognize significant differences in character, but agreed that college was a formative experience for all, and that high school to present, we felt very different.

What then, are the catalysts for personal development? Moving to a new city is an obvious / superficial one, but the underlying reason is that being in a new city creates repeated opportunities for new challenges and encounters with people of differing backgrounds and perspectives, which thereby create repeated opportunities to change or reinforce your beliefs. A new city motivates you to break from routine. College provided a distinct separation from a past life, forcing you to learn and grow from new challenges that weren’t possible before. 

I think about this series of experiences, which slowly culminates in a changing of beliefs, in relation to Bayes' theorem, which is defined as follows: 



It tells us that when you begin with a prior belief A, and continuously update it with new observations B, the result is an updated posterior belief: A|B What if we could apply this formula to ourselves, and the world at large? Every person starts with a firm prior — an initial worldview — based on all her life experiences to date. With repeated encounters, adventures, challenges, and ordeals, her beliefs are slowly updated, and she’s left with a new point of view; a better version of herself.

If those experiences are diverse and very different from her initial experiences, the new beliefs, character and interests she holds after living through those experiences (her posterior worldview) may be diametrically opposed to her prior. Hopefully, it’s a more accurate reflection of the real world and she becomes a version of herself that she once aspired to be.



The analogy to Bayes’ theorem also tells us there isn’t a perfectly efficient and instantaneous way to change your personality or beliefs. The events and experiences B you live through will be experienced with some randomness — according to a probability distribution P(B). Some experiences may reinforce your beliefs, and others may change them. This process is slow and incremental, but over time, the aggregation of these experiences will push you towards greater conviction in what you believe to be true. 

Lately, there has been a lot of discussion on Twitter about leaving SF or NY for less populous cities, with more space and a lower cost of living, particularly for families with children. But there also seem to be many (less public) discussions and thoughts about moving intra-city. Anecdotally, friends my age are making plans to move between SF, NY, and Seattle (I grew up in Seattle so there is definitely a selection bias in favor of what I’m paying attention to here). I believe the density of cities creates frequent opportunities for life-changing experiences, and therefore, people are moving from one life-changing chapter to another.

I’m back at home with my parents for a short time, like many of my peers this year. It feels like a partial regression to my childhood self. Here, I am frozen in time, a version of my 17-year-old self. In a period where many of us feel stagnant in our social or professional lives, we yearn for something to move us forward.  The media tells us to be patient this year, to be compassionate with ourselves, but we’re burning for more. Of course, we’re romanticizing a version of these cities depicted through movies, shows, and Instagram stories, which aren't wholly true today, but how could we not? These depictions represent at least a partial, irresistible truth. We choose to believe they still hold a potential future, one that we hope to be a part of.