When to Go Back
I sat with Christine in a café in Friedrichshain last week—someone who actually knows how to live online—and we talked about whether we’d stay in Berlin forever, whether anything here really anchored us anymore. She hit on something that wouldn’t leave me alone.
Eight years. Charlottenburg to Wedding, then Tokyo for a stretch, back to Neukölln, then Kreuzberg, then Prenzlauer Berg, another detour through Tokyo, now Friedrichshain. I keep feeling like I’ve played through every version of this city that still matters.
I’ve slept with women from both sides of town, come down hard enough to watch the sun rise somewhere near Potsdam, tried drugs I can’t even name anymore. Maybe just bad MDMA cut with who knows what. The point is I’ve done all the usual stuff—enough clubs and afterparties and beds that you’d think it would feel normal by now. Except it doesn’t. It just feels hollow.
My life these days is basically this: I only drag myself out if some agency’s throwing a free drinks party and I’m on the list. Street food markets packed with tourists? Overpriced garbage. Hipster flea markets? Keep it. Berghain? I’ve got no interest in hepatitis, thanks.
I’m not from Berlin. Small town in Bavaria, Buchloe, wedged between three bigger cities that made it irrelevant. No cinema, no McDonald’s, nothing. The video game shop where I spent my money closed because people kept stealing. I couldn’t wait to get out—London, Tokyo, Berlin, anywhere that felt far and big.
My feed has been filling up lately with people moving back. Friends who did the Berlin thing a few years ago, now posting pictures from home—cycling through wildflower fields, picnicking by lakes, drinking decent beer. There’s something in those photos.
Germany’s supposed to hate Bavaria, or at least thinks it should. Maybe there’s a reason. But here’s the thing: it’s actually great. If I ever have kids I’m doing whatever it takes to get them into a Bavarian school, even though I basically failed my way through one. Anything’s better than a Waldorf school run by people who think they understand childhood.
There’s a saying back home: everyone comes back. When I left for design school in Berlin, I thought that was hilarious—absolutely not, never, goodbye forever. I was out.
Now I’m scrolling through postcards from people who actually did go back. From Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, back to Bavaria. Building lives there. The blue sky. The green mountains. And something keeps gnawing at me: what the hell am I doing here?
When I first moved, the answer was simple—the job. But for the last five years I’ve been telling myself it’s because Berlin is where it all happens, where the people who matter actually live. Maybe that’s true. I have no idea how much it matters.
I know people living in absolute nowhere who make good money and maybe go to re:publica once a year and just exist. They figured out email still works. Is Berlin actually essential or just necessary to believe in if you’re the type of person who moved here?
Maybe I miss the accent. Maybe I miss the landscape, something about the light, the food. Or maybe I’m making all that up—another story to tell myself because I’m bored and always have been. Didn’t I want to go back to Tokyo? Is going home a failure? Some kind of surrender? Would my younger self beat me for considering it?
Obviously I miss my family. I had good people around me growing up, a good childhood in the way those things actually count. But realistically? It’s not a place you go to create anything. Munich maybe, but nobody can afford Munich and I hate the Mercedes people more than I hate the hipster bloggers anyway, and at least I know what I actually am.
Everyone comes back. Will I? The world’s open and I’m wondering if I should move back to where I was born. Is that stupid? Am I giving up on something I haven’t finished? Was Berlin always supposed to be temporary? Where does anyone find anything real—closer or farther away?
Sometimes I envy people with normal jobs who have to live where they work. Does freedom actually paralyze you? Will someone walk by with actual problems and wonder why I’m having a geography crisis? Will I regret this if Berlin really is the center? Every question just tightens the knot.
So there we were in this cheap café on Frankfurter Allee, and someone cleaned up a dead pigeon that had been lying under the next table. Christine and I talked through it—whether leaving made sense, whether going back to the beer and castles and home cooking was possible, whether that was even what either of us actually wanted. And I keep coming back to the same thing: when is the right time to go back?