I’ll do it when things settle down.
Most of us have said it. About the holiday we keep putting off. The career change we’re not quite ready for. The life that feels one chapter away.
I said it about moving to Matakana. Because the weighing up process is real — and anyone who tells you it isn’t has either never done it or forgotten what it felt like. You’re trading the known for the unknown. The city for somewhere that operates differently. The proximity and pulse of Auckland for something you can feel but can’t quite name yet.
For us, it was health that created the inflection point. Living to work. Busyness eating happiness. The kind of tired that a weekend doesn’t fix. Covid had already shown us what we needed — space, nature, time that belonged to us — and we couldn’t unsee it.
Ours isn’t the only story on my street.
The couple two doors down had just retired. They didn’t want to disappear into the countryside — they wanted to walk five minutes to the village cinema and shops, meet friends at the pub, catch the market on a Saturday morning, still feel the weekend buzz. But they were done with city density. Done with noise that never quite stops. They wanted to fall asleep to silence and wake up next to the sea. Matakana gave them the village without the city attached to it.
Lots of families moved here for their kids. Wanting them to have the freedom and sense of safety they had growing up. To walk to a small school where everyone knows everyone — to grow up with a sense of place and community that city suburbs can’t manufacture. The kids do winter football in Warkworth and junior surf lifesaving at Omaha in summer. The ice cream shop knows their orders. They know the names of the neighbours they pass on the way home.
My son does too.
That’s not a small thing. In a world that keeps getting faster and more anonymous, knowing your people — being known — is something parents are quietly desperate for and rarely say out loud.
The common thread isn’t age or life stage. It’s the moment you stop deferring the life you actually want and start asking what’s really stopping you.
For most people, the answer is distance. But the motorway changed the numbers. Matakana to Auckland is fifty minutes now. On a good day, faster than Dominion Road to the Viaduct used to be — and I know because I sat in that traffic for years.
It’s not remote. It’s not a retirement plan. It’s not a compromise.
It’s a choice. And it’s available now — not in ten years, not when the mortgage is paid down, not when the kids leave school.
If you’re sitting with that weighing up process — the one that keeps circling back — I’d love to talk. Not to sell you anything. Just to share what the move actually looks like. The real numbers, the practicalities, and the things you only find out once you’ve done it.
The wait was never protecting me. It was just habit.
