Episode 2: On ageing in cities

Most people believe that as you get older, the best place for you is a city, and that's just wrong.

Yesterday I went out into nature for the first time in 60 days. I've been basically locked inside, with the furthest I get is onto a terrace in front of my cottage. My leg, my hip and my lower back are basically useless with excruciating pain. 

But yesterday I had a good day. An old friend of mine who knows where I am passed by and saw the state I was in, threw me in her car and took me up to the top of a mountain where there's nothing but an old monastery. She let me out by a rock having brought a picnic so that we could stay up there for a while...and there I cried.

It led me to think about questions that I received as I got older. How my lifestyle of nomadic traveling and expeditions seemed too difficult to other people. I kept getting these questions of how long would I be able to continue doing this?

"Are you able to continue your lifestyle",

I realized that most people believe that as you get older, the best place for you is a city where you have hospitals and support and family and things like that. And that's just wrong. Cities are very hard.

For older people, cities are places to go and die, and suffer in between. When you're younger, it's great: there's commerce, there's social life, there's connectivity, but in the city, unless you have a huge support circle, you're alone. That loneliness and that the fact that you could die in your apartment building or die on the street, and nobody would ever notice is, it gets in your soul.

And it makes people afraid: they're afraid to walk down the street, because they might trip over a sidewalk, they're afraid of cars that don't understand that they're slower, the sidewalks or cement streets are made out of other materials that are incredibly unforgiving.