Did you even wonder if an important decision you made long ago was the right one? I do it all the time! Yet a recent visit provided reinforcement that I was right about Palm Springs.

Right about Palm Springs? What am I even talking about? (or, what kind of first world problem is this?)

Here goes: I made a decision to sell a condominium I owned (and lived in) out there in the desert in 2011 basically so that I could retire early and fund the gap between then and the time I’d be able to collect Social Security.

Great Recession

It was the end of the Great Recession awfulness and job prospects were dim, especially when you were 55, as I was that year (2010). I’d gotten laid off and I didn’t want another corporate-type job anyway, and when I weighed options on how to support myself, using this asset seemed to make the most sense.

Also, I had determined I was an urban person, not a suburban or small town guy. I wanted to go back to the big city for those social and cultural benefits.

Through the ensuing years I was happy about that part, but did miss the condominium itself — the space, the design, the patios, the complex with the pool and especially the Jacuzzi.

Missing the Desert

I also missed my friends out there. Turns out, after all was said and done is that it’s hard to make new friends, it’s hard to renew friendships that have lapsed, and I think all of this gets harder as one gets older.

All that made me wonder if I’d made the wrong decision back in 2010-2011. In the 10 years that have passed Palm Springs has become unaffordable to me, and in Los Angeles I’m locked into a rent controlled apartment. On the one hand, that’s good, because the rent is below market. Then you realize you can’t move anywhere else in town because everything is so expensive.

So I’ve joined the ranks of friends and relatives in cities like San Francisco and New York who’ve lived in the same rental apartments for 40, 50 years. And now I understand why.

I Was Right About Palm Springs

So back to Palm Springs. I recently went out there for a couple of days, for some R & R. The weather was great, very warm but not too hot, dry, and I was reminded of what I’d loved there — the stillness. That wonderful aroma of dry. The general ease of doing things.

But I also remembered the unease. The claustrophobia I felt living there was back right away as soon as I drove into town. The suburban ethos of the civic design — which means you need a car for basically everything. The smallness of the place itself — which I could see in total from a perch on Mt. San Jacinto during a hike.

So it turns out I was right about Palm Springs. It was not the right place. For me, anyway.

Here’s Eve Babitz, from her story “Bad Day at Palm Springs” in the book Slow Days, Fast Company:

“The peace that some claim to find in all that sand will never happen to me in Palm Springs, no matter how I hope for flat dry hot air so bloodless that I won’t even have to breathe or think.”