Living the Dream (Beta)

 

Living the Dream™ app inputs (left) and output (right). The app can never be built.

A friend said to us once, "You two are living the dream!" when she found out we were going to live in Italy. It was meant kindly, and we took it that way. Still, the phrase gave us pause. Whose dream exactly? And what did we do to enable this consciously or unconsciously? 

It’s a curious statement, because it tells us as much about the person who says it as it does about our lives here. Their imagined Italy streams in (olive trees, late-afternoon glow, maybe a nonna with an apron and wooden spoon), while our actual Italy bustles around us: conversations, waiting in line at the post office, a walk to a Sunday dinner at a trattoria, and the day-to-day texture that never shows up on postcards.

None of this is bad. It’s just more complicated than the dream phrase suggests. And so, to understand this dreamy projection, we imagined building an app.

The App

We would call it Living the Dream™. The idea is that you open the app and dial in your ideal life in Italy as if tuning an old stereo: financial comfort, preferred location, weather, community, and expectations. A few simple questions, press “Generate Dream”, and eccola!

But what comes out of the app may surprise you.

Dream Inputs

Financial Situation
Settings:

• Comfortable enough to buy an aperitivo once a week.
• Rent is manageable.
• Own a crumbling-yet-charming palazzo.
• Able to renovate a medieval tower.

Impact: 3%. Turns out money helps, but only to a certain point.

Locale Selector
Settings:

• Hilltop village (but not the one with 1-euro houses).
• Periphery of a city with bars on lower windows.
• Urban palazzo with questionable plumbing.
• Near a strong Wi-Fi signal.
• Anywhere but where I am now.

Impact: 7%. After three weeks, any place reveals its traffic, noise, or neighbor who drills at 7 a.m.


Bureaucracy Tolerance
Settings:

• Scared of paper cuts.
• Forms induce hives.
• You queue with impatience.
• Zen monk of the queue.

Impact: highly erratic. Occasionally transcendental.


Community & Belonging
Settings:

• You know where the grocery store is.
• You know the name and birthday of the barista in the café you frequent.
• People beep and wave at you when you are walking on the street.
• You are invited to family functions.
• You find yourself showing up to funerals with hesitation.

Impact: 22%. A fact we’ve rediscovered many times and is often underestimated.


Expectations Knob
Settings:

• Instagram Dream
• Aspirational Mood Board
• Average Tuesday Realism

Impact: Unknown. Expectations are a setting that never stays put.


Weather Sentiment
Settings:

• You need to wear sunglasses every day.
• You want winter only long enough to justify a new coat.
• You function best with moody, overcast skies.
• You prefer weather that is not actively trying to prove a point.

Impact: 5%. Meteorology resists optimization. The weather doesn’t care about your settings.


Hidden Setting: Presence

Invisible to the user. Adjusted by sleep, good walks, friendships, and noticing small joys.

Impact: Consistently the greatest.

The Unexpected Output

After dialing your settings and pressing “Generate Dream”, you might anticipate a score of feasibility for your dream, the name of a town to start your dream, or something to get you going. But instead, the app – stubbornly or wisely – pauses for a moment and finally displays:

"You were living the dream last Sunday at 1:14 p.m.”

You scratch your head and realize you were out on a walk in the woods with a friend on a sunny winter day on your way to a trattoria for lunch.

No score. No city recommendation. Just a moment.

The app has decided that the dream is not settings. It’s an instance. A flash. Something lived but rarely labeled.

The app knows its limits. It can't manufacture:

• the warmth of stepping into a trattoria after a brisk walk,
• the familiarity of walking streets you now know by heart,
• the reinvigoration after a walk in the hills on a lazy afternoon,
• the café that suddenly feels like your café,
• the invitations to baptisms and the closures of funerals,
• the tiny rituals that are hard to explain but are felt,
• and yes even queuing for everything.

The app can only surface what is already there.

Whose Dream Is It, Really?

When someone says, "You’re living the dream," we hear it differently now. It’s not about perfection or escape. It’s about the very human instinct to imagine that somewhere else—or someone else—has cracked the code.

But our fictional app insists otherwise: There is no code to crack. Your dream isn’t built from optimized parameters. It’s assembled from moments you noticed. It's created in real time, without settings, and often without realizing you have created it until much later.

And that friend who first told us we were living the dream? We hear her differently now. She’s someone who has gone after and realized many of her own dreams—raising a family, buying houses with potential and turning them into beautiful homes, even moving to Palm Springs for a while before returning to Seattle. Maybe her words weren’t a projection at all, but encouragement from someone who recognizes a familiar arc in someone else’s story.

At the same time, Italians sometimes look at us with disbelief. Why would you choose to live here they ask. Their dreams often point westward, toward the United States; ours pointed eastward, toward Italy. It’s a reminder that dreams are always relative, shaped by circumstances, culture, history, and whatever context we happen to be standing in.

An app could never truly measure or output a dream. Our app won’t ever have an official release version.