Should I move somewhere cheaper?

A cheaper place may offer real relief. It may also offer the appealing fantasy that a difficult life becomes simple once it has a different address. Try separating those hopes without dismissing either the financial pressure or your wish for change.

What would you miss that you currently take for granted? Familiar faces, a particular walk, help nearby, the ease of being understood? Their importance may not appear in the comparison that first made moving attractive. Equally, you might discover that some attachments concern the person you hoped to become in your current city more than the life you actually lead there.

You do not need to prove loyalty to a place by remaining under strain. Describe the life the move could realistically support, including loneliness and adjustment as well as relief. A move is easier to choose honestly when it is allowed to improve some things without being expected to rescue everything.

Cheaper is a relationship between a price and your resources. A more livable place is a relationship between a place and your whole daily life. Sometimes these point in the same direction; sometimes they do not.

Look at work, transport, care, companionship and the commitments that would remain behind. Would someone else's practical burden grow because yours became lighter? That question does not give others a permanent claim on your address, but it deserves a real answer.

Where possible, encounter the proposed life through ordinary days rather than the pleasure of visiting. Buying groceries and needing to get somewhere tell you different things from admiring a view. Jing wants the move freed from the duty to rescue everything. I would add that staying should be freed from the duty to prove you belong. You can appreciate a place and recognise that a workable life is becoming easier to build elsewhere.

I would like to move somewhere where the rent is inexpensive, the friends are already established, the bakery knows me and all my favourite streets have agreed to relocate. Apparently this is called staying, and it is currently unaffordable.

The relocation brochure offers a lower price and a photograph of a lake. I asked whether the lake can collect a parcel when I am out. It cannot. Very beautiful, disappointing administrative skills.

Jang recommends ordinary days. This is unfair to brochures, which have spent years eliminating them. They contain no wet laundry, missed buses or Tuesday evenings when everyone you know is somewhere else.

I propose a second brochure. Same lake, but beside it a person carrying groceries in the rain. Inside: the actual journey to work, one local conversation and a chair you could imagine sitting in. No aerial photography. If I cannot afford a helicopter, I would prefer to evaluate the place from my own height.