Pura Vida

Dispatch from Costa Rica

Howdy friends,

I’m back from a hiatus, and recovering from my third run-in with COVID (do I get a prize now?).

Welcome to new subscribers! 🎉 It is always an honor have your attention. Thanks for being here! Since many of you are new here, I recommend checking out any of these three pieces after reading today’s post.

Laziness

Friendship Lines

Capital “W” Writer

Enjoy!

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Pura Vida

Tamarindo, Costa Rica. Photo by Camilo Moreno-Salamanca

I spent a week in Tamarindo, Costa Rica. It’s a beach town with dusty roads, ragged surf boards, and palm trees that strike a pose.

The heat gave the impression that you were inside a Weber grill (where’s the off button??), and the air from the tropical rains felt like a moist blanket. My sweat was sweating. 

The city is about the same size as San Francisco¹, though San Francisco is 100 times more populated. I saw people, mostly non-native, getting around on foot, on motorcycles, in golf carts, and in early 2000s cars that tested the limits of their suspensions traversing the bumpy streets.

I ended up there for a bachelor party.² My friend chose it because of the great surfing conditions of the Pacific waters. We went out surfing—a first for me. I learned that surfboards, like skateboards, are as cool as they are unforgiving. I didn’t manage to stand up, but I took a sucker punch to the chin delivered by my surfboard. I’d never been punched in the face before³, so I guess this counts as a rite of passage. You should have seen the board though. 

What I found interesting was the large number of non-natives that lived there. I met a barista from Vancouver B.C. that looked every bit like the fairy she had tattooed on her thigh. Turns out that Tinkerbell has a sister. I met a man from Uruguay who moved to Tamarindo 15 years ago. He carried his melodic charrua accent all the way to this beach town, where he now owns a café that feels like the top of a tree house and has two children he carries like howler monkeys. I also met a Brazilian yoga instructor, who seems to one of five instructors in town. She also makes her living by DJing and god knows what else. 

These are some of the characters I met in this town, which has become a haven for immigrants and expats. The large influx of Europeans and Anglo tourists and expats has led to the town’s nickname: Tamagringo. Here, English is spoken as often as the typical Costa Rican’s catchphrase, “pura vida.”

If you’ve never heard the phrase “pura vida,” it means “pure life.” It’s annexed to the end of most phrases in Costa Rica:

“Thank you, my friend. Pura vida.”

“Have a good day. Pura vida.”

“No problem. Pura vida.”

“Go fuck yourself. Pura vida.”⁴

It is said so often, that you may think it’s a verbal tic. It’s an earworm, like this raccoon on social media. However, the ubiquity of the expression dilutes it and leaves it unstudied.

Pura vida is what binds natives and non-natives together. The purity in “pura vida” comes from its essentialism. It hints at a way to live life where we make space for leisure, prioritize relationships, and rebel against living life by stopwatch—every hurried minute acting as a metronome and robbing us of being present.

I’ve always thought of places like Tamarindo with some degree of contempt. I reduced them to tropical paradises where you could go roleplay Peter Pan and end up living in similar conditions as his Lost Boys gang from the movie Hooked. I’ve passed judgment on the characters that lived in these towns, and believed they were running away from something, overindulging their hedonistic desires, and failing to see the responsibility that came with being an immigrant in a foreign land.⁵

My discernment now tells me there is more to this story. They may be playing Peter Pan, but there may be something valuable about living in Neverland. 

By my fifth day in Tamarindo, I started settling into the speed of the town. Checking my watch mattered less and my steps were meandering. I can only imagine someone from Manhattan walking through town here—you’d think they’d be Olympic sprinters. 

I saw space for leisure, and in that space, you can see how people can pursue endeavors that intrinsically motivate them. The town’s rhythm allowed for deepening relationships. I ended up talking for an hour with two girls, one from Sweden and another from New Jersey, about life, relationships, and our futures. 

How often can you afford to spend an unplanned hour of deep conversation with two random strangers that you’ll probably never see again? How much time can you allocate to pursue your quirky passion project, when your kids have daycare and activities, your job has meetings and fire drills, and your house has a leaky roof and a jungle of a lawn—all demanding your immediate attention? 

I’ve come to the conclusion that, yes, those who have chosen to make Tamarindo their home are in fact escaping from something. They are escaping our over-stimulated day-to-day. They do not want to live in the never-ending now. They are tired of everything being solved by Adderall and Ozempic. They are running away from “friendships” that never see each other even though you only live 20 minutes away because “life is so crazy right now.”

They escape their something to go live pura vida. 

It’s not that pura vida can’t be lived in our cities. But the conditions are not ripe for it. Trying to live pura vida in New York, or even Seattle, isn’t easy. 

Any extension of my reflections about Tamarindo and pura vida, taken to their most naive extremes, leads to a utopia. Yes, let’s turn all American metropolises into beach towns where the beer flows starting at 9am, sunset gatherings are rituals, and every night can be a party. Let’s see what that does to the economy, our social fabric, and all of the other things we clutch pearls about. 

We don’t believe that we can have a life of leisure in big cities, because the reality of city life tends to be either one of survival, or climbing the social ladder. Both are processes that do not leave any room to breathe. While we all mutter under our breath that whatever the hell we are doing in our city lives is not sustainable or fulfilling, we are all looking around to see who will be the first person to ease off the gas pedal in our frantic world. It’s the classical prisoner’s dilemma.

We also hold the idea of careers as the paragon of modern existence. There is no better way than to pursue a career and commit to it (the younger the better). The idea of switching careers, working fewer hours (part-time, for instance), and taking sabbaticals are still taboo. They are met with “are you sure about that?” because of this dominant frame that careers are how you have to live, particularly in big cities. Anyone who challenges this way of life may be eclectic and affable, but deep down we wonder how long their “game” is going to last and at what point will they have to suck it up and get a “big person” job again.

But the wisdom of pura vida is alluring—and it’s backed by research. Harvard’s long-running study on happiness arrives at a key conclusion: The quality of your relationships is what has the highest impact on your well-being and sense of happiness in life. Adding leisure to our lives allows for broader connection, developing “weak ties” with your community, and deepening the quality of our relationships. 

Living by pura vida is both an individual and collective process. Seattle is not going to change overnight, so the next best thing is to try to live pura vida in Seattle: taking mid-day naps in our grassy parks, catching daily sunsets, and being more open to getting lost in conversation with the person next to me at the coffee shop.

Collectively, I hope we get to a point where we realize not everything is urgent. Seeing the value of slowness as part of the creative process. The immeasurable value of leisure and playing for the sake of play. Getting lost in conversation with a stranger, with no agenda other than to share our humanity and indulge our curiosity.

This is the pura vida we can all live.

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Foticos

Here are some of my favorite shots from Tamarindo.

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Before you go…

Thank you to

Michael Dean

and

Emily Ann Hill

for their thoughts and feedback on this essay!

1.  Tamarindo has an area of 48.59 square miles and San Francisco has an area of 46.87 square miles.

2. Hi Spenser! *waves aggressively*

3. Always protect your money maker.

4. Ok, no one said this to me, but I suspect they use “pura vida” even under hostile circumstances.

5. I still have evolving thoughts on how expats and Euro/Anglo immigrants adapt to life in these types of beach towns, but that’s a whole other piece altogether.