Lucky Enough to Have Too Much

On downsizing, gratitude and helping homeless youth in L.A. this season

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

For mostly happy reasons, I have spent the past 10 years moving into smaller and smaller living quarters. When I tell people this, they either look at me sadly and think Poor guy is going through some bad stuff or they brighten and loudly say something like, That’s so great! I wish I could do that!

The truth is, as my life changed — both vocationally and geographically — I didn’t need as much room as I had when I lived in Los Angeles. Southern California is a place that’s mostly about space and sunlight. But it’s also about spending hours in the car creeping along in traffic, so by the time you get home you’re really ready to spread out. California houses have lots of big, empty spaces and outside spaces to let the light in. In Los Angeles, people head over to Costco in their giant SUVs and load up with everything, confident that it’ll all fit somewhere. California houses have plenty of closet space — it helps that there aren’t a lot of heavy coats fighting for space — though because the California uniform is mostly t-shirts, there’s plenty of rack space to spare.

But then I moved to Manhattan, where space and light are things that you buy with money — and it takes lots and lots of it — and even the rich people I know have trouble stacking the sweaters and t-shirts in their closets. When I finally sold my house in Los Angeles and moved permanently to Manhattan, it was like trying to squeeze into a pair of pants you wore many decades and a thousand pints of ice cream ago.