Is it possible to feel free without FOMO?
And should I move to Nashville?
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Dear friend —
One thing I’ve learned since becoming a nomad: Get to a city, and you’ll be able to sense immediately whether it’s growing or shrinking.
It’s amazing how visceral this sense is — an instant physical reaction that hits you as soon as you arrive. In a shrinking city, you automatically find yourself drawing inward — against the place’s broken dreams, its inchoate anxieties, its vague feeling of doom. The streets, even when clean, feel run down and slightly ghostly, like a party that ended long before you arrived — all who remain are the sad hangers-on, too drunk to drive but already hung over, with nowhere better to go.
But arrive at a growing city, and you feel expansive, vibrant, free! The days seem brighter, the nights glowier! Everyone is good looking! Even when nothing’s going on there’s a sense of possibility, feeding off the energy in the streets. Just turn the corner, and something wonderful may happen, something that completely transforms your life —
Which is to say: Before I visited them, I thought Memphis and Nashville similar cities — both in Tennessee, about 600,000 people large, and rich with musical history. But in person, the two places feel nothing alike. Memphis has the empty gloom of an abandoned ex-lover who’s never quite managed to get over the loss. Nashville, on the other hand, feels like a bachelorette party in full swing — not least because it actually is the bachelorette party capital of America.
I knew almost nothing about Nashville before I got there, but learned pretty quickly this place is a real tourist town — Vegas for midwesterners. Broadway, the main downtown drag, is a long, boisterous row of clubs and bars, each with its own live band. I walked into Tootsie’s, one of the famous honkytonks, to find each of the three floors packed shoulder to shoulder with unmasked drinkers, dancing and loudly singing along to a Miley Cyrus cover. Back outside, the road was filled with pedal pubs — powered by groups of mostly girls in matching outfits playing drinking games and gyrating suggestively on their seats for onlookers. Guys yelled to get their attention. The energy was very spring break.
Are all these people vaccinated? I wondered this as I wandered into The Twelve Thirty Club, one of the more sedate spots, if only by comparison. I found a seat at the bar and met a guy called Melvin, who told me he’d just been vaccinated. He and his friends had initially planned to go to Vegas for Electric Daisy Carnival, but the event had gotten pushed back to October — so they’d driven to Nashville.
A cover band was taking requests for tips, playing everything from Sublime to the Beatles. People were dropping twenties in the jar to get their song played. “I’m from Nigeria,” Melvin offered without my asking him. He’d moved to the U.S. when he was twelve. Now he managed construction projects. All the buildings going up in Nashville piqued his interest: “There’s a crane every three blocks!” In Chicago, work was picking up, but people wanted projects done at pre-Covid prices, he said. Things were more expensive now, though. Labor, equipment, materials — prices had all gone up for everything.
Nashville, Austin — the two cities I liked in the south were the cities growing at breakneck speed. What did that mean? That weekend I went to a hip neighborhood called 12 South, which has an Abbot Kinney-ish vibe but with a southern flair, being the home of Reese Witherspoon’s fashion store Draper James. Every restaurant was packed, with lines out the door.
I had better luck finding a table when I walked over on a weekday evening and sat on the patio at Frothy Monkey — one of those coffee shop-meets-bar combos that I’ve discovered are popular in the south (why don’t we have these in California?). The young waiter’s face lit up when he checked my ID. “You’re from California! Me too!”
He’d moved to Nashville six months before, from Tustin. Why? “All my friends left, and I was bored,” he said. Prosecco wasn’t on the menu but he got it for me — they had some on hand for making mimosas. Did he like Nashville? “I don’t think I’ll stay forever, but I like it for now.”
Everyone I met in Nashville seemed either to be a tourist or a recent transplant. At Publix, the cashier was from San Diego. “You’re from home!” she said when I told her I was from L.A. She said she loved it in Nashville, she was glad she’d moved.
I started to wonder: Should I move here? Everyone seems nice! Neighborhoods are cute and clean and fun! And all the other Californians are doing it — rents are half what they are in L.A….
Over bluegrass brunch at The Sutler, I met two guys — one from Wisconsin, the other Illinois — in town for a bachelor party weekend that had just ended. They looked visibly hung over. The Wisconsin guy had four drinks going — a water, a coffee, a bloody Mary, and a bottomless mimosa. The Illinois guy was an attorney; he’d recently had a Zoom meeting with a judge where one of the defendants showed up with no shirt on.
They guys had their bags with them to fly home right after — back to their midwestern small towns where they’d been born, grown up, and — I’m guessing here — will likely live out the rest of their lives.
I was glad not to be them. But I still don’t know where to live. In Nashville I felt a certain pressure that I remembered from L.A. A vibrant city does that to you — pushes you to see, do, meet. In short, it gives you FOMO. It can create a low-grade anxiety that you’re never out and in it enough, you’re not making enough happen — an anxiety that you don’t have to deal with, for better or for worse, in shrinking cities or small towns. In those, you rarely fear you’re missing out. You’re faced instead with the sense you’re trapped in a life too limited, with too little sense of possibility.
Is it possible to feel free without FOMO, calm without feeling confined?
Have you been to Nashville, and if so, did you like it?
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love:
How Nashville became one big bachelorette party. “The draw to Nashville isn’t to go and be a tourist, but to go and spend a weekend sort of pretending that you live there — and, who knows, maybe one day make it a reality, and bring your friends and business along with you.”
Women who said no to motherhood. “There’s this expectation that we must justify our choice. People ask, ‘Why not?’ Why don’t we ask the other question: ‘Why are you choosing to have a child?’ That’s the bigger question.”
Would you sell me pictures of your feet? David Farrier got a DM from a stranger asking for foot pics — and decided to respond.
Of course exciting, growing cities are more interesting than dead ones! Did you like Nashville better than Austin? I’ve never been but have wanted to visit. Spokane is kinda in the middle, maybe more like Memphis than Nashville except tons of people have been loving here during the pandemic and this city has been changing in the few years ive lived here. I don’t have FOMO but I’m also entering middle age now so maybe that’s it.
I've been to Nashville a few times but I liked it so much better about twelve years ago before it turned into Nashvegas. I'm old though, so take that into consideration. I love these posts Siel. Thanks especially for this observation on how Southern California and Nashville create a "low-grade anxiety that you’re never out and in it enough, you’re not making enough happen."