I know it’s obvious to anyone who’s read many of my blog posts, but I love data: Collecting it, analysing it, and talking about it. Sometimes it’s about things related to my university education and post-university avocation, things like polling and census data, election results, and pretty much anything else relating to politics, elections, and social justice. However, there’s a lot of other data that I collect (and talk about), like the performance of my solar panels, for example. And then there’s the large category of “Other”, all the stuff that’s quite possibly only of interest to me, but that can help me make important life decisions. Like something I ran across recently.
More than 20 years ago, I decided to make a list of every single place I’d lived in my life up to that point. I’ve long since forgotten why I decided to make the list, but when I ran across it, I decided to update it, and I did that over this past weekend. The final, updated version surprised me.
When I looked at the original list, I saw that I’d noted that it was last updated “Monday, 5 November 2001 11:50am”, and that meant that I’d been living in the first house Nigel and I shared (which had been his before I moved to New Zealand) for six years. Actually, it was three days after the sixth anniversary—maybe that had something do with my reason for making the list? Maybe I was going to talk about it in an email to friends and family back in the USA?
At any rate, that house was number 5 on 2001 the list, out of a total of 12 homes. The top three were all my parents homes, which makes sense, and I’d even helpfully listed the places I also lived while away at university, places that were all technically concurrent with the last of my parents’ homes, something I apparently thought required a special footnote. The rest were all the places I’d lived after I moved to Chicago and, of course, that first place I lived in New Zealand.
When I decided to update the list, I noticed that the homes were ranked by the number years and months I lived in the home—but with no specific dates. So, I couldn’t be sure whether the amount of time spent in each one was as accurate as I’d have liked—being a few days off isn’t good enough, really. Still, so much time has passed that I have no hope of remembering the dates of places I lived in Illinois, and I probably didn’t write it down anywhere, either. My addressees in New Zealand, however, were all much easier to work out: I have documentation.
Once I revised the list, there was a new total of 18 places I’ve lived in my life, and the new number one is the house Nigel and I shared on Auckland’s North Shore before we moved in 2017 to south Auckland to be closer to Nigel’s work (I recently talked about my visit to that house, which is now a rental).
Other changes are that the first house Nigel and I shared moved up to number 4, displacing one of my parents’ houses. At the moment, my current house is tied for seventh place with the last apartment I had in Chicago, though next month it displaces the apartment in the rankings, which will move down to 8 on the list. My current house won’t move up to number 6 until early 2026, assuming I’m still in this house at that point (a topic for another day), but if that happens, a few months later it would move up to five.
The entirety of the list is interesting only to me, but the data behind told me a few things I couldn’t know otherwise. For example, the average time I spent living in each place was 3.614 years (a bit more than 3 years, 7 months), and the median was 2.835 years (around 2 years, 10 months). This surprised me at first, because I lived in my top two addresses for around a decade each. However, the bottom six addresses were all under one year (and two were just one month). Of course, the main factor is that I’m now 65, and I’ve had a lot more years other than the couple decades for the top two addresses, and I obviously had to live somewhere for the other 45 years.
This is useful to me as I try to work out what’s next for me: Where’s the best place for me to grow old? How do I even work that out? And, if I decide to move somewhere, when is the right time to do that, wherever/whenever that ends up being? This is a very complicated topic, which is why I said earlier it’s “a topic for another day”.
Still, because of the revised list, and my analysis of it, I now know that I’m not especially attached to any particular place, and never have been. This is actually kind of liberating! If I decide to move somewhere else next month, next year, or in a decade, it’s really all kind of the same for me, based on my history. It even means that I could end up living in my current house longer than any other place. All of this depends on what happens in my life, with my health and mobility, and what I decide I want in the years ahead—none of which I can possibly know right now.
Before I make any major decision, I like to have as much information as possible. This data from this little, seemingly insignificant exercise has given me a lot of new information. It won’t necessarily make my long-term decisions any easier to make, but at least It’ll help me to be as well-informed as possible.
It’s no wonder that I love data.
2 comments:
I lived in lots of apartments. The number of places I lived is north of 30! And I've been here since 2000.
Sheesh—and I thought my total was a lot! Seriously, I don't think the number of places actually matters: I know people roughly my age who've lived all their lives in a handful of places, plus people who are younger who seem to have lived in a lot more than me. To me, it's like every other experience in life, and what we take away from it that matters most.
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