If you insist on feeling miserable, you should live someplace that will make you feel ridiculous.

My life is good. I’m physically healthy, materially secure, and engaged with my community. I’m a full-time writer, and it’s nice to make a living off something I’d be doing anyway. I don’t have a lot of quantifiable complaints, and they mostly involve parking and, you know, all this damned human suffering.

I do live with depression and complex PTSD, both of which can be debilitating and excruciating, neither of which seems to be going anywhere. I’m an avoidant weirdo who uses his pain and paranoia as prophylactics against intimacy, which has damaged some of his most treasured relationships and made it difficult for him to form new ones. I just wrapped up a bloodbath of a divorce, which left me a fundamentally different person. 

This is a lonely time in my life. And there’s nowhere I’d rather spend it than Venice, California.

After pinballing around Los Angeles for years, I landed in Venice, an elegantly gnarly West Side community with a rich bohemian legacy and a reputation for candy-colored chaos. It covers three square miles on the coast, and I love it here. When my brooding gets out of control, Venice throws me some sunshine and absurdity and helps me get my head out of my ass long enough to enjoy a tangerine smoothie.

Here are a few of the myriad reasons why Venice is the best place to live.

I live by the ocean

I’ve always wanted to live by the ocean. I love to walk on the beach, watch the sunset from the pier, surf badly, or sit in the water and let the waves rush over my head. The ocean soothes, heals, and grounds me, and it’s full of terrifying creatures I’m sure would have my back in a combat scenario. In my own creative work, the dramatic cruelty of Posideon gives me something to aspire to.

The ocean doesn’t care about my problems, but it’s strong enough to wash them away. The tides plug me into the natural rhythms of life, which helps me get sexier with age. Living on the beach ain’t cheap, but for me, its antidepressant powers are well worth it.

Self-care is our religion

Recent circumstances have forced me to spend a lot of time Doing The Work these days, and Venice has ample resources to facilitate it. 

There are dozens of healing modalities I can try within a half-hour walk from my building. If I find myself in extremis, I can do holotropic breathwork, do any sort of yoga I can twist myself into, attend a Buddhist addiction-recovery meeting on the beach, dance at a silent disco, or spend two sublime hours in a sensory-deprivation float tank. There are so many self-care practices to try, cacao drinks to consume, and cool cults to join that it can be hard to fit suffering into my schedule.

Yes, Southern California wellness culture is full of toxic positivity, spiritual bypassing, and obliviousness to its own ironies. That makes it so much more entertaining. Keep your swivel-head on and don’t dance too close to the abyss.

Yes, Southern California wellness culture is full of toxic positivity, spiritual bypassing, and obliviousness to its own ironies.

It’s full of people more interesting than me

Venice is a place where you can witness the six realms of life and death on a daily basis. We’re home to the lowest, the highest, and the very, very high. It’s packed with dreamers, hustlers, and the Don Quixotes of our time. “We’re all here because we’re not all there.”

Much like you, I’m a fascinating person. Lately, though, I’ve noticed that there are other people around, too, and getting to know them can be like parachuting into a foreign country, without getting a visa or needing a lot of shots (most of the time). Some of the most interesting people I know live in Venice.

Make even a modest effort to talk to your neighbors, and you’ll meet Hollywood animals, survivors with hard-luck stories that will curl your hair, actual artistic geniuses who have dropped out of society in service to their work, and at least one other dude named “Emerson.”

Tru Artis is a rapper and roast comedian who performs on Ocean Front Walk. One day, I was struggling. I took a walk to clear my head but ended up stewing in my own frustration, moving too quickly with a cute little storm cloud over my head. As I passed Tru Artis’s workstation, he turned his attention to me and said, “this man does too much cocaine. Stop doing cocaine.” It was a false allegation, but he had a point, and he brought me down to earth, Venice-style.

It’s not always easy to laugh at myself, but in Venice, I get a lot of help. And if I talk about myself too much, which I do, Venice has no problem changing the subject.

Everything is impermanent

Venice is warm, but not scorching compared to the rest of the city – I don’t have or need air conditioning. The cool, grey marine layer fills the mornings with existential reverb. In the afternoon, the sunshine pours like a thundershower. The sunsets will make you fall in love with yourself.

Between the skate park, Muscle Beach, the bars and boutiques of Abbot Kinney, the high-end soirees in the canals, and the dudes on the corner blasting Mount Westmore’s “Big Subwoofer” nine times in a row, the party never stops. 

And it could all be gone at any moment. If The Big One doesn’t get us, the rising water levels will. By the time the apocalypse hits the Inland Empire, I’ll probably be long gone, and I’m okay with that. It injects some much-appreciated urgency into my life. Knowing I could die at any time gets me much more invested in living.

Venice does have its downsides. It’s fuck-all expensive, which makes it an impractical homestead for people with certain life goals. The people get hotter every year, but so does everything else. The conflict between the unhoused and the NIMBY gentrifiers is becoming a deadly existential horrorshow with no resolution in sight. I’ve considered decamping for Seattle, Atlanta, or your mom’s guest house, and I might – the future’s up for grabs.

But, for now, Venice is where I belong, in my modest apartment with ample space for all my psychological maladies, within walking distance of the end of the world.

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