Personal reflections on moving from Canada to NYC
I’m moving from Canada to New York City this week, and I’m having a mini-existential crisis. There are the personal reasons I feel torn—what if I’m lonely, what if I don’t fit in, what if New York doesn’t magically fix the frustrations I had in Toronto, forcing me to confront the horrifying possibility that there’s no “better place”? But there’s also a bigger reason I’m feeling this way.
It feels like I’m abandoning Canada—not just the physical place where my friends and family live, but the idea of Canada. I’m not merely a Canadian by birth—I believe in the Canadian project. I believe in our values. I believe, as Etienne Fortier-Dubois argued in this great article, that Toronto specifically, and Canada in general, are about as close to utopia as it gets. The national motto, Peace, Order, and Good Government , isn’t just a bureaucratic slogan on a government-sponsored advertisement; it actually encapsulates something deep about who we are.
I guess part of this is that not only do I resonate with Canadian values, but I think what we created is fragile and worth protecting. I worry that my move is seen as a sort of tacit endorsement of American values over Canadian ones, and if Canada went more in the direction of the U.S. (or if more people like me left), what makes Canada so special could deteriorate. The reasonable nature, the high trust, the synergy of individualism and collectivism—the things that make Canada so wonderful, are difficult to maintain.
