"The fact that people in countries with cold weather tend to be harder working, richer, less relaxed, less amicable, less tolerant of idleness, more (over) organized and more harried than those in hotter climates should make us wonder whether wealth is mere indemnification, and motivation is just overcompensation for not having a real life." - Taleb

When it comes to living, there is no escaping geography. Portions of human neurology get activated as you traverse the globe: just like how people in the East tend to be rugged, backwoodish and closed-minded to the point of xenophobia, when you go past a certain latitude, you're going to encounter lethargy as the locale simply does not receive much sunlight.

This is Canada:

People wonder why, with all the forced mass migration into this big country, why isn't there enough living space for all the newcomers? The answer is simple: over half of the country's land-mass is as uninhabitable as Siberia. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either in denial or a Trudeau dick-rider. As a result, you can feel the massive difference in ambient energy when you visit California down in the sun-belt, as opposed to Montreal where you have to purchase a Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) lamp, or else you suffer the effects of depression when it's not summer.

And unless you're given into receiving Canadian tax rebate like David Cronenberg with his early films, or just plain financial bribery, there is effectively no entertainment industry outside of Vancouver - which never stands for itself, but always doubles for some other well-known place in America.

A friend told me how in the province of Nunavut, you get paid to live there in an isolated small town, where the one store doesn't have everything, and where the main thing to do besides freeze to death is sit down and watch movies.

This same friend also compared Columbia - how everyone there is jovial, sociable and lively, while here, it's lonely and hard to connect with all the introverted work-hards without signing up for events or groups.

I've endured a general sense of isolation and existential malaise, as the question would pop up in my head why all the exciting stuff would be happening down in the States, or elsewhere in the world, until I stumbled upon the concept of neuro-geography. Hitler called it lebensraum, as though a sense of envy and lack had driven him into violently expanding the territorial boundaries of a humiliated Germany.

The only advantage of life in Canada is that it's forced me to turn to my imagination, as if to compensate for the intrinsic dullness which pervades the air I breathe. The wisdom is to migrate when the very area you live in causes you suffering, like Travis Bickle lashing out in New York because he was a mid-Westerner caught out of place where hustling means everything.