The Oddities of Experiencing a Different Lifestyle for the Short Term

A trip from my parental home in the northern suburbs of San Diego to the city center is quite a journey. Swapping through multiple trains, buses, and even a few Ubers, not to mention walks and wait times, each journey quickly becomes a two-hour-plus ordeal, physically draining due to the blazing sun of southern California and visually unappealing due to the constant sights of multilane freeways and shrub-filled canyons. Even in a car, the journey is not shortened by much, as rush-hour traffic has cars piled up in queues every time there is a red light.

The contrast between the suburb-to-center commute in San Diego with transport in my day-to-day life in Japan cannot be more significant. Whereas San Diegans are expected to wait at least half an hour for a bus that takes them across town, my current home of Chiba has a fast train to the center of Tokyo every few minutes. For someone who feels that the 50-minute long Chiba-to-Tokyo journey is way too long, it is simply too difficult to justify how I would be able to sit through intra-city transport in San Diego that takes up several times that duration.

So I felt dumbfounded when I had to go visit my parents in San Diego for a short week-long trip. With places I need to go and see on different days during the packed trip, I had little mental preparation for the amount of time I had to sit through the traffic as well as the physical and mental toll that these journeys took. To beat traffic, days started as early as 6am, and the resulting tiredness, combined with the darkness of the night, safety risks in less populated areas, and infrequent availability of late-night transport, meant that I was in bed by 10pm on most nights. 

For someone who voluntarily chose to leave the city at the age of 18, it remains baffling that many of San Diego's long-term residents, my parents included, find this lifestyle of long commutes and early starts/ends to days commonplace, normal, and acceptable. My long time away from the city and its daily life has made me extremely uncomfortable with how residents choose to live, simply because it is so different from my daily life in Japan and many other countries I resided before it. The differences are so massive that I simply could not see myself ever getting used to the lifestyle.

This sentiment is not meant to be a condemnation of the San Diegan lifestyle. The greenery of the city, with parks and gardens dotted throughout its expansive suburbs, is courtesy of the car-centered lifestyle that makes more areas accessible despite a lack of public transportation. And despite the frequent use of cars, the accessibility of outdoor activities such as hiking the various trails, fishing in various lakes, and swimming in the Pacific Ocean, combined with that early-to-rise, early-to-sleep schedule, has the potential to make the city's residents healthier than those stuck in packed trains and neon-lit urbanscapes.

Yet, the very nature of my short-term stay in the city has helped to accentuate the negative aspects of this lifestyle, while overlooking those positive parts. By being so inadvertently focused on comparing San Diego with Chiba, picking out the aspects of San Diego that are closest to Chiba in lifestyle, such as its very walkable downtown area, and terming the walkable areas as "modern," I have come to subconsciously define the car-based culture, one that I am highly unfamiliar with, as backward and undesirable. 

Such a biased way of thinking is deeply unfair to San Diegans, as well as everywhere else where the San Diegan lifestyle is seen as ideal. And given the reality of San Diego being one of the most desirable cities to live in the US and famed as a tourist destination, this way of thinking is likely to be mainstream, at least in the US. My finding the San Diegan lifestyle to be below me, because my current lifestyle is different, is neither objective nor open-minded. For someone who believes in the diversity of values and beliefs, this is deeply disappointing upon self-reflection.

Indeed, the very fact that I find so much to dislike about San Diego during my short visit there speaks to my personal need to continue expanding my horizons and ways of thinking. Despite the long commute and fatigue, there are plenty, from the food to the weather, that I utterly enjoyed during my short stay in the city. By focusing on the positives of every experience I have, whether it be lifestyle-related or otherwise, I would be able to accommodate more ways of thinking and living without working up such an emotional fuss. Clearly, I have much to learn about myself based on my short travels.