Making a Better Life

Why do we as a people all believe that the grass is greener somewhere else?

My job is a source of major stress right now. Without my salary we cannot afford our home.
I broached the fact that maybe we should not be fighting to save a home but a quality of life. Maybe we could have a better quality of life somewhere with a cheaper cost of living.

I have spent a few hours searching for alternative places with a lower cost of living. Southern CA is quite expensive. It is also so different from what I grew up with. I grew up in a small town, surrounded by family, with lots of open space.

My husband will never live anywhere with weather.  He wants temperate 70 degrees all the time. That rules out being near my family, it snows where they live.

Quality of life is something we keep saying we aspire to and yet it is a vague idea. Maybe it means I stay home, maybe it means we can see family more often, have more money to spend on trips and save for college, have the best school system for our children.

I did a search of the best places to live in the US and so many towns in California were high on the list. So if this is the case why am I so anxious to leave?

It is the strange, seemingly universal, unfounded belief that the grass is going to be greener if we move somewhere else.  I hear this constantly. My co-worker who finally moved out of her mother's house, my friends who keep talking about moving to Oregon and Washington state; one of whom moves in August.  Yet my co-worker who finally moved out of her mother's home has found some difficulties she did not expect and spends a lot of time helping her mother now which is not as convenient as when she lived at home.  Will the transition pains be worth it? Would we end up in a better place?  Would we make closer friends than we have here?

I think our best next step is for us to decide concretely what we want, what we think would make for a better quality of life and then see if we can make that happen here or if we really thinking moving is the only way to achieve those defined measurable goals.

As much as I want to assume, maybe irrationally, that things will be better if we move and start over I need to find a way to make a decision free of this irrational hope and temper the unreasonable belief that the grass will be greener somewhere else.