A year ago, I made the mistake of confusing hating Berlin with not wanting to live in a big city anymore, and I moved to a small town. It didn't go well.

At the same time, I declared 2024 to be the Year of Friendship. Those two things combined resulted in one of the worst times of my life. I had never felt more alone than in the first six months of this year.

Fortunately, after accepting that I made an oopsie and needed to rectify the situation, I went ahead and found a new apartment in the city where I spent my most formative years. It felt like coming home.

Which brings us back to my yearly theme: Was 2024 the Year of Friendship?

Absolutely.

The second half of the year was one of my best and most social ever. It surprisingly made 2024 the best year in recent history. Spending the summer, autumn, and winter surrounded by friends compensated for my time in loneliness enough for this year to be considered a success.

This was a triumph.

HUGE SUCCESS.

I grew up in a small village near the coast of the North Sea. Six thousand inhabitants, all of them very concerned with what the other 5,999 could think about them. This never felt right to me, and I thought there should be more to life than that. Even going to school in a city of 26,000 didn't change that feeling. The people around me didn’t share my interests, but I connected with others online who lived in big cities. I wasn't able to communicate exactly what I was feeling back then but I knew that I needed to get out.

Fortunately, 16 years later, I somehow found myself in the same situation again and am now able to express what it is that bothers me.

After living in Berlin Mitte for eight years, I was completely convinced that I needed a cozy small town without the depressing anonymity and all the noise. How great it would be to walk outside and not have to dodge others left and right.

I was wrong.

I miss what I was despising just a couple of months ago.

Yes, it was a lot and I wished for quieter surroundings at times. Of course, I wasn't happy with some aspects of my situation. Yes, I've seen a surprising amount of penises from randos pissing on the street. Not great!

It was interesting, though. Things changed from day to day. People were weird. Normal. Exciting. Profane. Loud. Quiet. Something. I stepped outside and life happened.

Schwerin, with it's less than 100,000 inhabitants, most of them teenagers or pensioners, is... boring.

Not in the way I thought it would be, where I expected the quietness and solitude to magically expand my mind. Walden Pond style. On the contrary: I kind of feel alone and mentally under-challenged.

I don't want to come across as contemptuous. A different version of me could love it here. I just don't want to be that version. Even though I respect everyone who finds what they're looking for in a place like this.

I've found that I want to be surrounded by people my age, with a high likelihood of shared interests. And as cringe as it might sound, I'm afraid mine are big-city-people interests. Internet-work people. I want to see, meet, and talk to people... like me. Or at least me-adjacent.

Here's the catch, though: People like me feel like they don't belong here.

I know because — and this might come as a surprise to you — I am a person like me.

And that's just one aspect. If you had asked me about this six months ago, I would have said something completely different, but here’s the reality: It’s too empty here. I can go for a 45-minute run and only meet five people—all of them pensioners, of course. I can walk from the main station to my flat on a Saturday night and not encounter a single person. That’s just depressing.

I haven't felt like this since moving away from where I grew up.

What I expected before the move was an expansion into a new way of being. Of feeling content with smallness, of finding joy in normalcy. Instead, it feels like a regression to something I left behind for a reason.

A reason that hasn't changed since I first felt it more than 16 years ago.

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

Many of you (nobody) asked how moving from a 3.8 million inhabitants city to a less than 100,000 inhabitants city is treating me. In the last couple of months, I went through quite a lot of thoughts and emotions and arrived at some new opinions that surprised me. I won't be able to fit them all in one coherent post so here you go, in no particular order and in good-old blogging style. Welcome to part one of who knows how many instalments of IMHMAO.

Today: Local Retail.

I wasn't expecting this, like at all, but I seem to have demands for the quality and diversity of stores around me. Every time I tried to buy something in a store in Schwerin, I wasn't able to find what I was looking for. We're not talking about heavily exotic stuff here. Pants, for example, were nowhere to be found. None of them fit me, they were all far too big. I'm not weirdly shaped, on the contrary. It won't get more default than me. I ran out of stores to try before I found something I liked. That never happened before. Another time I tried to buy brushes: Nothing. Same for sketchbooks. Same for pretty baskets to store stuff in or colorful decoration. Nothing.

This might seem like a small matter but I like walking somewhere, browsing a limited but plentiful offering of wares and going back home with whatever I needed as the result. It makes me feel connected to where I am.

It doesn't help that online shopping became a pain in the ass at some point. There's just too much to choose from, everything, even Amazon, is full of scams and I hate the whole process. Choosing, ordering, waiting, tracking, receiving, returning. I don't need that noise.

So that's an insight: I would not have guessed that a heavily limited selection of stores would influence my mood this much but it does. The more you know!

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

It just so happened that I now live in a city where I don’t really know anyone. That could be a problem, but only if I let it become one. Instead, I want to embrace it as a project.

If I were someone who defined a Cortex style yearly theme, my theme for 2024 would be “The Year of Friendship”. Numerous studies, scientists, and - I guess - life coaches agree: Your relationships shape your life. Having a robust social life is key to happiness. The book The Good Life discusses this at length. It’s about the Grant Study that has been running for literally generations and conclusively shows that people consider their life to have been a good one when they had strong relationships.

My condolences to myself, as I don’t have a choice and somehow have to make new friends.

This shouldn’t be hard. Statistically, nearly half of the German people my age feel lonely. I just have to find those who are eager to change something about their situation.

Unfortunately, I’m not somebody who signs up for soccer practice or some kind of choir. I actually can’t come up with any group activity I’d like to do, except for joining a book club, but there doesn’t seem to be one in Schwerin. I’d start one, but… yes, I don’t know people yet. Apps like Bumble BFF are a no-go as well, I’m afraid. Nobody seems to use them here. Working remotely also removes the possibility of befriending colleagues.

Which leaves me with a couple of not very good ideas for now:

• Joining a gym. I’d do this anyway, and it’s not the most social thing ever, but it’s something where I might meet people? Maybe?
• Getting into running. That’s on my bucket list for this year as well, and - again - not a very social activity, but as soon as I become something of a runner, I can join some kind of running group…? That’s something people do, right?
• Bouldering? I guess? I did this once and it ended up with me having to ram thrombosis injections into my then-girlfriend’s leg every day for six weeks. The half hour of trying to get up a fake-mountain was kind of fun, though. But do people make friends while hanging off an indoor cliff?
• Start working in coworking spaces and cafes. This one has potential. The only problem is that I actually like to work when I’m working, and I tend to be focused and not very talkative when trying to get stuff done. I would need to not do that and instead try to talk to people. “Hello, fellow human, what are your thoughts about caffeinated beverages?” This will be great.

Why is this list so sports-heavy? Something like competitive knitting or hackathons would be much more in my wheelhouse. Unfortunately both aren’t available.

I’m optimistic that something will work, even though I haven’t found the perfect solution yet. This post isn’t supposed to sound self-pitying. It’s just the text I can link to when I tell you about all the friends I made in my review of 2024. There will be check-ins along the way. Looking at this like a project makes it easier for me to actually try new things and see what works.

If you have other ideas, or by some kind of freak accident, know somebody who lives in Schwerin and needs somebody to hang out with, let me know.