- 14 Dec, 2025 *
Waking up on the morning of my 23rd birthday, I realized that the new life I had been longing for had finally begun. Feeling cheerful, energetic and excited, I jumped out of bed and quickly got ready for the day. I didn’t know what lay ahead, but I was sure that the future was looking bright!
Only a couple of days before had I signed a new work contract, arranged to stay with friends, packed up all my stuff into a single sport bag, grabbed my beloved bicycle, and then boarded the train to Berlin. And with that, I had left everything else behind.
About two years earlier I had resolved to move to …
- 14 Dec, 2025 *
Waking up on the morning of my 23rd birthday, I realized that the new life I had been longing for had finally begun. Feeling cheerful, energetic and excited, I jumped out of bed and quickly got ready for the day. I didn’t know what lay ahead, but I was sure that the future was looking bright!
Only a couple of days before had I signed a new work contract, arranged to stay with friends, packed up all my stuff into a single sport bag, grabbed my beloved bicycle, and then boarded the train to Berlin. And with that, I had left everything else behind.
About two years earlier I had resolved to move to Berlin, but I didn’t quite know when to do so.
After all, I had just moved out of my parent’s house, started studying at the local university, and even secured a part-time job as a working student. What’s more, my family and most of my friends had stayed close to where I was living now. I was leading a fairly happy life and so I didn’t see an immediate need to change anything.
And yet, I knew that eventually I wanted to live in Berlin. The reason was simple: I struggled to find like-minded people where I lived, but I knew how easy it was in Berlin.
I had fallen in love with computers ever since I learned how to program them. I was so excited about the seemingly endless possibilities that my life pretty much resolved around that topic. And I wanted to hang out with others who shared the same excitement.
Studying computer science was supposed to fix that, but sadly I didn’t really connect with any of my fellow students. The same was true for my job as a working student. And since I had just come out of school, I didn’t yet have any industry contacts that could have helped me.
As a result, I was left with a feeling of loneliness, boredom and of missing out on all the action. No one else in my life shared these feelings, and so I thought of myself as a misfit, as someone who didn’t belong.
But Berlin was different! From experience I knew that I could find what I was looking for there.
I had been to the city multiple times throughout my life, be it for school excursions, to visit one of my best friends (who had moved there), to ride my mountain-bike (another hobby of mine), to go to tech exhibitions, or even to talk at meetups.
Every time I visited, the city felt vibrant, quirky, and open-armed. It was bustling with interesting individuals, full of opportunity and offering adventures both big and small.
It had everything I cared about back then: multiple universities, exciting tech startups, hundreds of meetup groups, various coworking spaces and affordable living. Most importantly though, meeting like-minded people was ridiculously easy!
Eventually I realized that Berlin was were I felt right at home, even though I had never lived there! That was when I decided to move to Berlin.
There was just one problem: my life was still bound to the old place. In particular, three things kept me from moving to Berlin right then:
- I was still enrolled in university: even though I had found out that I no longer wanted to study computer science, I was worried about actually quitting university. Even though I no longer visited any classes, I was still enrolled on paper. I clung to that false feeling of confidence.
- I really enjoyed living with my friends: Together with two of my friends, we had rented a nice apartment close to university. It was an interesting, comfortable and enjoyable arrangement full of entertainment and parties.
- I had found a local startup that I loved working for: Thanks to the internet, I had miraculously found a small startup close to where I was living. Finally, I had found my tribe, was making interesting things, and kept learning from others! I enjoyed it so much that I hung out there all the time.
In retrospect, I believe that the job at the startup was the main reason I stayed. It gave me almost everything that I was longing for at the time: community, adventure, and purpose.
Taken together, these three things I was happy enough with my life. As a result, I didn’t feel any urgency to move to Berlin. And had things stayed that way, I might have never made the move!
But, fortunately, life intervened. Over the ensuing two years, the things that kept me happy and complacent began to unravel:
- After my first two semesters (during which I completed only one single class), I finally understood that I was wasting my time and mustered the courage to withdraw from university.
- Spending so much time at the startup, I stopped engaging so much with my flatmates. And bit by bit, although unconsciously, I withdrew from our shared social life. Our relationship suffered from that and eventually I decided to move out.
- The founders of the startup began fighting with each other and it turned nasty fairly quickly. Not long after, the funding dried up and solvency became an issue. Consequently, it stopped being such a great place.
At the time, each of these changes was difficult to navigate. But taken together, they made the next steps both obvious and easy: it was time to move to Berlin!
Preparing for my new life was surprisingly easy. I knew that I needed a place to stay and a way to earn some money. So I called some friends and acquaintances. It didn’t take long before I found what I was looking for. The parents of one of my best friends had a spare room in the basement that I could use. And a former coworker connected me with a startup that was looking for programmers. Immediately, I accepted both offers.
The only thing left to do was getting myself and my stuff over to Berlin.
Since I didn’t own much at the time, I managed to fit everything essential into a single sport back (the rest I sold or gave away). The only other thing I took with me was my trusted bicycle.
Having prepared in this way, I boarded the next train to Berlin. And thus began my new life, a few days before I turned 23.
Little did I know it at the time, but my new life turned out better than I could have ever imagined!
After all, Berlin is where I got the opportunity to reinvent myself, where I met two of my closest friends, and where I fell in love with the the most amazing woman (now my wife and the mother of my two beloved children).
And now, more than a decade later, Berlin is still where I feel right at home.