What's the plan?

I’ve been talking about my moving plans for some time now. Not just on nostr but also in personal conversations.

I’ve long thought about where to even put this explainer so I don’t always have to start at 0 when explaining the plan. What is it that I’m actually doing here and how do I best explain it by painting a mental picture in someone’s head without confusing the hell out of them? Am I going to move deep into the forest and disappear? Am I homesteading? Am I going full on hermit? Will I be living off grid? Am I going to become a farmer?

Expectations

I don’t know how I would call it nor what to expect. Maybe just “leaving the city” or “moving closer to nature” sums it up best, even if it sounds cliche. All I can tell you is that I’m currently living in a city with a population of ~650.000 people that no longer feels like home. I’ll soon be moving to a small town near Fulda in Hesse with a population of <20.000.

The city is noisy and expensive and I no longer enjoy its vibe the way I used to. I’ve long grown tired of hang around hackerspaces and some or values have progressively diverged over the last few years. No longer do I go to see movies in the cinema (hello superhero fatique) and even arthouse cinemas aren’t that attractive to me anymore. I’ve never been much of a bar, pub or party person anyways, so that’s also not something I’d be missing out on. I’ve also ridden most of the bicycle routes leading out of the center of the city I currently live in to exhaustion so they’re all boring by now. It all feels too familiar and I don’t want to get stuck and grow old living here.

The feeling of changes ahead

I also always wanted to leave Germany for another country since at least 2014. For the longest time it were the Netherlands that seemed most interesting but I’ve since abandoned any NATO-aligned destinations for my post-2027 plans. Nowadays I feel more of a pull towards Eastern Europe, for many reasons I may or may not get deeper into in the future. I’ve been feeling an increasing urge for charge for some time now and as of 2025, this feels just right.

Around 2020-2022 I couldn’t shake this feeling of beeing stuck and trapped. I no longer felt like I had much in common with the few remaining friends I still believed I had. I abandoned the SaaS product we were working on and cut ties with almost all of them. Breakups are also a good opportunity for change. After having spent the last 8 years together, my now ex-girlfriend and I decided to walk different paths by the end of the year. For me, this means a more solitary life in a more remote area of Germany.

Complexity must be reduced

Leaving my home country AND moving to a more remote area AND taking 3 furry critters with me AND transporting all my belongings through multiple countries on the European continent AND getting used to a new culture AND having to cross multiple country borders AND learning a new language just feels like a terribly complicated and convoluted approach.

If a client approached me with the plan of moving their on-premises monolithic enterprise app to the cloud while simultanously rewriting the entire application in a new programming language following a rather new paradigm like Functions as a Service or a Microservice Architecture while also migrating their database from MSSQL to Postgres, I’d strongly advise them to reduce complexity, split that plan into multiple chunks and spread the amount of changes over a longer period of time to then slowly iterate over each of them in a controlled manner.

Trust the Plan

This is how I came up with the plan of just moving outside of the city within German borders:

• Leave the city.
• Get a feel for a more remote, rural life.
• Gain experience being dependant on either the bicycle or spotty public transport to get to the nearest city with a supermarket.
• Get used to not having a 2 dozens of quality cafés and roasteries within walking distance.
• Plan my meals instead of just YOLOing them a few minutes before the supermarkets close.

You might get the picture already: See how it goes and continue from wherever I end up.