An obvious and completely understandable question is “why leave?”  To put all facts on the table, both my wife and I have well-paying jobs, ostensibly helping to accomplish meaningful things in the greater DC work-o-sphere.  The house is fairly new and we both love it.  The kids are in a good school system.  All in all, we’ve got a pretty good thing going, and are infinitely thankful for that.  So again, “why leave?”

One answer is boredom.  As Tim Ferriss postulates in Four Hour Work Week, the opposite of happiness is not sadness but boredom.  My job has become an administrative exercise in perpetuating the status quo while linearly scaling to a larger bases of customers, revenue, and (somewhat) profit.  There is little challenge in this.  ”Keep doing what you’re doing, just do more of it” is not something that will make me happy for the next 10 years.

Another is that DC is not a location that caters to families as well as others.  The work here generally demands most of your waking hours to remain competitive with the person in the next cube.  The commutes are insidious – an hour each way for 15-30 miles is like taking an unpaid part-time gig just to be my own driver.  While working from home is somewhat of an option, it is justifiably trumped by security requirements that necessitate countless hours in small windowless rooms, all but cut off from the outside world.

Personally, I could easily deal with one or the other of these two factors.  A relatively unchallenging job is no sweat if you’ve got the time to spend with family and do more of whatever it is you want to do.  On the other side of the equation, the rewards of a highly challenging job – while it will never make up for personal time – can somewhat offset the increased amount of time it demands.

Without either of these “pegging the fun meter,” there’s little uncertainty left in the decision – it’s certainly time to consider other options.

When considering where to move, we had to really take a step back and see what drives us. A recent lifehacker.com article led us to the familyhack.com site, where Michael Davis recently implored readers to “Find the Environment Where You Thrive.”  A timely and interesting take that really amounts to “common sense” – find what kind of place makes you feel best and live there.  Wow – simple and to the point, isn’t it.  DC was a great place to be before kids, and for some folks can be great after.  For us, though, the equation is just not balancing.  Obviously, we’ve got an idea of the kind of location we will go – the beach – but  the only things left to decide are: exactly what beach/coastal area, what to do for a living, when do we do it, and how can we make it work?  Piece of cake… Right?

©2009, EscapingDC.com