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I went 1,612 days without having a “home.” But after bouncing around every continent except for Antarctica over the past 4.5 years, nothing more than the contents of two backpacks and a surfboard, I have done what would have been inconceivable not too long ago: I signed a 12-month lease. I am living in San Francisco, readjusting to the legal obligation of forking over money to a landlord.

Two summers ago, I was living in a palm-roofed cabana on the shores of Guatemala, seeking refuge in a shaded pool as record-breaking heat tore through Central America. Having just circumnavigated the planet via planes, buses, and boats, I was approaching the three-year milestone of nomadic life. And something curious started to surface within me: the urge to return to “normalcy.”

I was growing tired of being alone. I missed having a community that I could return to. I missed walking my dog, having a functional kitchen, and joining sports leagues. I missed the convenience of simple, but useful items, like hiking boots and an adequate cooking pan. I missed snowboarding, camping, and having a guitar at my disposal.

When I continued my travels to Africa through the following year, I was running on fumes. While living in Dakar, snacking on street peanuts packaged in recycled vodka bottles, I decided that nomad life had served its purpose for my early thirties. It was time for a change. As I watched another Senegal sunset dip below the sandy cityscape from my balcony, I mapped out a plan and started taking action. Ten months later, San Francisco is home.

If you’re moving to San Francisco

As much as I loved living in San Diego throughout my twenties, I was always fascinated by San Francisco. My life is peppered with memories from this city.

As a kid, I’d be the first to arrive at Giants games to collect batting practice balls, and I’d be the last waiting in the cold outside the players’ parking lot, hoping to get an autograph from Barry Bonds. I never did.

I saw Green Day at the height of their popularity in the city, back when my band covered their music at our middle school talent show. Another time, we got our car windows smashed in a dingy alley after watching Big D and the Kids Table at a dive bar. It was a long drive home, sitting on cardboard, the wind rattling my eardrums.

I have fond memories of sunny days spent at Dolores Park, skimboarding beside the Golden Gate Bridge, and sitting on the same stools at North Beach bars that my father and uncle did more than a half-century ago.

I always admired the city’s energy as an outsider, and now I get to experience it from the inside. I feel like the “weirdness” that my hometown of Santa Cruz mourns having lost to gentrification’s creep is still clinging to life in San Francisco. Between the man selling his poems from a push wagon at the park, to the guy riding his bicycle with a cockatoo calmly perched on its handlebars, the weird enclaves still exist here.

That, of course, is relative. Oldtimers will tell you that the city is long past its heyday, ever since the tech boom outpriced artists and replaced them with a fleet of driverless cars.

It’s true. AI advertisements have seized every commercializable surface — billboards, bus stops, buses — begging you to employ their chatbot. Walking in the city feels like real-life LinkedIn doomscrolling, an anxiety-inducing ecosystem where professional creators make you feel inept for not having created an AI agent to do your crypto day-trading. As I wrote these very words in an Outer Richmond French bistro, a young man at the table next to me was complaining about his workload. In the most 2026-San Franciscan response, his friend bluntly replied, “Why don’t you just use AI, bro?”

That said, there is still a lot more to the city than large language models. I think there are many pockets of cool and eccentric, which is refreshing.

I’ve quickly grown fond of my neighborhood and its gridded, wall-to-wall two-story houses. The Sunset — the westside of the city — has its own character: crusty surfers and college students sprinkled into an Asian-majority population. The result is hip surf shops and abundant Chinese food. The Sunset is gritty, built on shaky dunes, perpetually bombarded by the salty ocean breezes that erode exposed metal. Sand continually accumulates on the street edges, a reminder that dunes will reclaim the city as soon as humans cease to exist.

From my window, six blocks up from the beach, I can see the ocean’s horizon. I haven’t permanently lived somewhere with an ocean view since I studied in Chile 12 years ago. The sea’s dull roar is the white noise of sleeping in my west-facing room. It provokes dreams — or nightmares — of the bone-crushing sand bars at Ocean Beach that leave surfers praying their leash doesn’t break.

Life after nomading

I had forgotten what it’s like to commit my life to a single place for 12 months. The last time I knew where I’d be even 90 days in the future, my skin had significantly fewer sunspots.

Having a home has its perks. I have a reliable set of pots and pans, a bicycle, and I own a weed wacker now (filling a garage with stuff is the American dream, right?). I even splurged on a device that dries my wetsuit booties, a luxury that would have been implausible to carry during my travels. My showers are hot, every time, and the electricity is as stable as the foundations of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I do, however, have momentary bouts of, dare I say…guilt…living in the U.S. After making friends in India, Madagascar, and Lebanon, I look around at my surroundings — consumerism, car culture, waste, suburban sprawl, and ruthless pursuit of wealth irrespective of how it affects the rest of the world — and wonder, “Does any of this really matter?” But thoughts of ditching it all again fade when I remind myself that I wanted to be back here for a reason. Reverse culture shock is real. I think it’ll take a little getting used to.

Oddly, I don’t have any immediate desire to travel. Knowing me, that won’t last forever. But for now, I am enjoying what stability provides — bookshop jazz concerts, volleyball pick-up games, an in-home washing machine, French conversation hours, and tearing through books on the city bus.

I am aware that California’s unseasonably warm spring might be sending me into an endorphin-induced inebriation. Let’s see if the serotonin sputters when fog season envelops the peninsula. But I know what I signed up for. For now, stationary life feels right. I’ll reassess when my lease is up and see what my intuition tells me is best for the next phase of life.