The New Zealand Thing

The New Zealand Thing: Why I am in New Zealand

I moved from California to New Zealand in 2005.
There were a ton of reasons, severally insubstantial but jointly substantial enough.
I get asked about New Zealand quite a lot by Americans.
I've written a lot of things before on the topic, but it's been a while so I'm going to put down some new ways of looking at it.

This is page is mostly about me, and why I moved. If you want to know more about New Zealand itself, that will be on another page eventually, but check out the list at the bottom of this page.

For a long time I've had the dream of living in a small commune. Yes, I'm a libertarian and I believe in a form of communism. I think communism (my definition: shared property) is very effective, but only on very small scales. If you buy a swimming pool, you pay full cost, and get full use. If you share the purchase with 10 other families, you pay only 1/10th, but get darn near full usage, and the social aspects of using it together. Anyhow, as a kid, my brothers and I called this the "self-supporting estate" because the other aspect was that we could farm our food and essentially live isolated from world events if necessary. All my life I've kept my eye out for the ideal place to do this, knowing that once a place gets selected, it's not easy to pick up and move. New Zealand came up years ago as one of the better destinations for such a commune.

As an introvert, I live mostly inside my head.
Beyond that, I spend much of my time on the computer.
I configure my house to my liking, and spend a fair amount of time in the kitchen.
As long as there is a grocery store nearby, I could live anywhere.
The practical upshot of living in New Zealand versus California is pretty minimal.

One of the most substantial differences is a negative: I left my friends behind. ;-(
I don't have anywhere near as many new friends locally, mainly because I don't go to church, school, or work.
So why am I still here?

First, recognize the general fact that each person is different. Some are more social, some less. Some prefer the city, some the country. Some are nervous nellies, others adrenaline junkies.

I'm not happy about it, but I happen to be a nervous nelly. I wish I could just choose to not be, but it's not so simple. This trait has expressed itself numerous times:

I've had hypertension since I was nine.
I suffered for eight years with panic disorder
I had a psychotic break (Being psychotic is NOT the same as being psychopathic or sociopathic! I quickly recovered and I am perfectly healthy today).

I have trained myself to relax in several different ways, but often times the nervous symptoms just pop up in a different form! Six ways I've learned to deal with it is to:

relax using relaxation techniques
fight it by getting angry (turn fear into anger)
desensitization techniques, where there is a specific trigger
change my circumstances
be in control (I wouldn't mind flying so much if I was the pilot)
grin and bear it (suffer), as a last resort

When something is important to me, I never let anxiety or fear stop me, even if it means I have to suffer through it. I never enjoyed recreational drugs as much as most other people I know who have tried them because I worried too much about the negative health effects, but I did them anyways (the ones that aren't addictive) because I was not going to let fear stop me from living. I don't enjoy flying, but do it anyways.

Anyhow, a series of life events led me to choose the "change my circumstances" solution: The 9/11 incident rattled me as it did most Americans I suppose. All the anti-terrorism stuff rattled me even more. Every time I posted on the Internet I worried "is this going to appear to be linked to terrorism?" In 2004, I was in a high-stress job at Pfizer. It required flying twice per week (which I am particularly terrified of, but again, I refused to let fear control me and did it anyways). And as an important deadline loomed, and I became the lynchpin, more and more people were breathing down my neck, including people with three-letter titles. Then I started suffering from increasingly frequent ectopic heart beats (eventually this became paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, vagally mediated). It scared the bejezus out of me. Being a bit of a hyperchondriac, I worried about dying of a heart attack. Another factor also weighed heavily on me, which I'm omitting because it deserves a much longer discussion. But my life was essentially out of control on all fronts, and not being in control yields the exact kind of stress which has been found to precipitate heart attacks. I decided "this is just not worth it." I quit before the project was done (but right after I completed my part), incidentally burning some bridges (even though I gave them plenty of notice and opportunity to take the pressure off, and got the opposite instead; I still feel that they reaped what they sowed), and vowed to move to New Zealand, relax, and try to find a way to actually enjoy life before it ends suddenly.

So that is the main reason I moved. I've mellowed out quite a lot in the last few years, and I give New Zealand all the credit for that.

I don't have any plans to move back. I don't know of any place that I would rather be. The California Bay Area is just not appealing to me. It is heavily overbuilt, has a high cost of living, and has too many liberals for my taste (Sorry. I agree with liberals 90%, but the 10% where we disagree, liberals seem to be violently in disagreement and it scares me. I short-sell stocks, and am in some ways making money the way bankers make money... I suspect some of you want to light me with a torch). I simply cannot relax there, or feel welcomed and at home. I certainly enjoyed living it up while I was younger, but I'm not that person anymore.

Here are a number of other reasons I moved:

George W. Bush got in for a second term in the US. I thought his first term was clearly a mistake, but somehow the majority of Americans either weren't paying attention, or liked what he did, and either way this frightened me.
NZ has a much lower risk of war, terrorism, or violence of any kind.
Practically no risk of invasion by a neighboring state.
No nuclear devices anywhere nearby.
No poisonous animals, except one rare spider
Social capital is high. People focus much more on helping each other, and much less on keeping up with the Jones's. And people have a double-helping of common sense.
Lower cost of living.
If the economy gets really bad, to the point of disrupting the food markets, as a food exporter New Zealand will not have any problems with food scarcity.
Lower density of people: 4 million people over the same amount of land as California (35 million), Britain (80 million), or Japan (200 million).
I predicted a housing collapse in the US, and a subsequent economic collapse triggered by that. I didn't want to be at the epicenter. Turns out I was right.
I have a moral problem paying taxes to a government that uses 30% to militarily dominate the world. I have a moral problem with funding terrorism and anti-terrorism. [unfortunately I'm not allowed to stop paying US taxes as long as I remain a citizen]