Drudgery of life in the city

Trying to escape the drudgeries of life in the city isn’t a cakewalk, doesn’t matter who you are, rich or poor, living in cities is cold-hearted.At times it feels unbelievably fast, at other times it is painfully slow.My time in cities around the world have been thrilling, emotional, difficult and amazing, pretty much take any emotion and chances are, I’ve experienced it.As a tween, my mom told me that cities have their own definition of poverty describing it as a clean measure of income and ability to participate in life and make choices, she insisted that my future was dependent on choices I’ll make.I shared those words with a friend when he first proposed the idea of moving to Melbourne from Pilbara.I can’t say he was thrilled about the prospect of living in Melbourne as there are so many cities around Australia that he would have wanted to live in and Melbourne just wasn’t at the top of the list.But living in another state has been a longtime dream of his, and eventually after sharing insights about Melbourne, he was genuinely excited about finally having the opportunity to live there.There are a lot of reasons why he ultimately decided to take the plunge and move to Melbourne.I can still remember when he made the decision.Part of his thinking was to experience something different from state of Western Australia but knew the experience would be full of ups and downs. And since he landed in Melbourne a year ago today, it has been a roller coaster ride. It was love at first sight when he arrived in Melbourne where he fell hard with the sort of light-headed infatuation that makes it easy to overlook the odd flaws and to blithely ignore those flaws.There are a lot of little things that have been bugging him for a while. The prime real estate prices are billion miles compared to Pilbara and to him is a sign of how cities cares very little for the people that live in it.Melbourne is a sort of city that punishes less well off inhabitants for wanting to actively live there as housing prices, he says specifically, the spiraling rent increases since he can’t afford buying one, is a huge put off.Also trying to get about on the overcrowded trains makes it comprehensively more hassle than it’s worth. 

 The Pilbara native is also not amused that things like walking in neighborhood or getting to work are treated as privileges one has to earn.He also laments that upstairs neighbors are the perfect examples of neighbors from hell. Apparently, every morning the woman of asian origin upstairs lets out a groan for a few minutes and don’t know what is going on up there, but it’s like clockwork and wakes us up every morning.The woman also has many kids who run around that makes it sounds like a herd of goats stampeding.  Also, they play and shout so loud like as if marble is bouncing around in his head.However, despite those highs and lows, he finally feel like he’s getting into the groove of living in Melbourne.Yesterday we had a chat and he reminded of how instrumental I was in him moving to Melbourne instead of Sydney or Brisbane.For him, a large part of the reason he love Melbourne is because he love to learn and sees the city as one big classroom and has become a non-stop learning experience for him.While living in Melbourne has its positives and negatives, he told me his experience has been priceless.Being able to spend the past twelve months in a city he might never have given a second thought at has been pretty eye-opening for the Pilbara native. Since he’s been in Melbourne, he has learned all sorts of stuff from cultural to arts and wholeheartedly believe he wouldn’t have gained the knowledge if he hadn’t had the chance to spend time in Melbourne.One of the the thing he appreciate most about his whole Melbourne experience is that he has become so much more dependent on himself. It is an experience that has pushed him and tried him in ways he wouldn’t have thought possible. Even though most of the time he feel like an isolated bloke, he know Melbourne experience has made him do things he never thought he would or could if he hadn’t moved from Pilbara. He can’t even imagine what the next twelve months will bring, which is highly exciting and scary for him. As my mom told me a decade ago, cities good life is a preserve of criminal millionaires and not average outback native, good luck to my buddy. This article first appeared here 

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