Write Down What You Do Not Want

By Neil Solomon · 2 min read

Picture a woman named Anita. She is sixty, she has just retired after thirty years as a nurse, and she has written a list of what she wants from the place she will live next. She wrote that she wants sunshine and a view of the water.

She reads it back and notices that it describes half the coastal towns in the world. A list of wants fits too many places to choose between them.

So she turns the page and writes a second list: the things she could not live with.

No winters with ice on the sidewalk. For thirty years she treated patients who had fallen on it.
No place more than a day’s travel from her sister.
No place without a hospital she would trust within an hour.
No place where the label on a pill bottle is in a writing she cannot read.
No place where her monthly spending swings with the exchange rate.
No town that empties out when the tourists leave.

This list is harder to write and easier to use. She lays it beside the towns she likes. The seaside town she loves fails on three lines. The nearest hospital is two hours away, most of the town closes for the winter, and the flights to her sister take two days.

She is sad for an evening. Then she crosses it off.

Two towns pass. One of them is a place she had not heard of a month earlier.

No place is perfect. Every town on her list fails some line. The aim is to find the one that fails the fewest, and to know which failures she can live with.

I have spent years traveling in many countries, and the same thing happened to me. The places I could rule out taught me faster than the places I loved. A list of dislikes is about the person who writes it. A woman who loves snow could cross out Anita’s first line and write a different one, and that would be right for her.

You might think a list of dislikes is a gloomy way to choose a home. Anita thought so too, until each line she crossed off made the map smaller and the choice easier.

You could write ten lines, one for each thing that would make an ordinary day harder. You could put the strongest first, and then hold the list beside the countries you are considering.

One of those lines may be a number. If cost is on your list, our calculator shows what a way of living costs in each country we cover. The other lines are yours.

What is the first line on your list? Tell us in the comments. Someone reading may be stuck on theirs, and yours could be the line they were missing.