Too much freedom

Wine at breakfast, empty houses at night, and wrestling with Spanish time

Greetings from Cornudella de Montsant,

For a few weeks, it seemed progress on the renovation here would have to stop. My neighbor complained; the architect from the town showed up at my door; and now I am waiting for the permit to continue building.

So I went on holiday—took my son to Gibraltar, spent the New Year in Morocco. Train to bus, to ferry, to train again, a camel ride to a tent in the desert, and finally back to Barcelona by plane.

All the while I tried to forget about the lack of progress. The slow pace of Spanish life is wonderful except when one wishes to get building approval. Still, there are many things I can do here. The gigantic pile of brick and concrete in the back can be removed. Crumbling plaster on the walls can be patched. The ground floor storage spaces can be fixed. The stone wall can be repointed.

There is a lot to do.

Bags full of demolished concrete and brick wait to be taken away.

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I. Drinking wine in Spain in January

Last week I went for beers with my Irish friend in Barcelona—as a proper Irishman, I expected him to put back no fewer than three jarras, as is common during our periodic meetings in town. Normally I try to keep up. But just then he was two weeks into drynuary, and not sure he’d last the full month. And meanwhile, I’ve dramatically reduced my drinking the past few months.

I wanted to write about all of this, and a bit more about drinking in Spain generally, ever since the surgeon general said alcohol should come with cancer warning labels. Now, “soberish” is having its moment in the media zeitgeist.

I want to write about alcohol—and as if on queue I looked up from my table at the Renaixanca cafe to see an empty beer glass, wine glass, and vermut glass on the table across from me. The trifecta. It was 10 a.m. on a Sunday.

A few days ago, Brendan Boyle wrote about the barrio culture in Spain that prioritizes low-investment socializing outdoors:

The Spanish bar isn’t just about alcohol. It’s an extension of the home, a miniature town square that exists for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or even a quick pit stop in between. There’s no pressure to stay long or order pints. It’s where neighbours cross paths, parents steal a few minutes of adult conversation, and pensioners linger over coffee with no hurry at all.

In Spain, the “third” spaces are properly interwoven into daily life, which Brian takes to at least partially explain the relative absence of heavy drinking here, as opposed to the “occasion-based” drinking in countries where it’s much more expensive, such as Ireland and the UK.

It’s true, people in Spain don’t really get drunk. Witness a loud, drunk person on the street in Barcelona, and chances are you’re looking at a British or German tourist, not a local.

My mom noticed it when she visited and took my son to an FC Barcelona game—her satisfaction as a grandparent in seeing my son’s pure joy when Lamine Yamal scored his first goal was surpassed only by her surprise that absolutely no one in the stadium appeared drunk (she had previously spent several years in the UK and had expected something similar to the all-out drink fests in British football).

Among all my friends here, in fact, it’s the Catalan climber who probably drinks the least. Despite the pervasive day drinking I witness on a regular basis, or perhaps because of it, he appears more aware at a younger age that alcohol dependency has a pernicious way of sneaking up on you.

Indeed, the longer I live in Spain the less drinking I’ve been doing. This is deliberate, not natural. I know as my friend does that €3 bottles of Priorat wine can get very addicting, very fast. So I’ve taken steps.

According to the most recent data, Spain ranks fifth in Europe for alcohol consumption, though the difference between #2 Germany and #5 Spain is just 0.12 liters/year per capita—less than a single glass of wine.

So it’s not that Spain drinks much less than its drunkard northern European neighbors. But they do undoubtedly handle it better. Conventional wisdom found in Brian’s piece as elsewhere holds that it has to do with frequency vs. quantity. Spaniards may casually drink wine at breakfast and a beer at lunch, but they rarely binge drink.

I’ve found similar patterns throughout Southern Europe, where a glass of wine has been embedded in Mediterranean culture and life for centuries.

Basically, it’s hard to get too worked up about alcohol consumption while living here. As casual drinkers throughout the U.S. re-examine their relationship to alcohol, I take heart in the fact that Spain’s life expectancy (84 years) is the highest in Europe. Italy is second. Similar to how all the Italians eat pizza and pasta every meal and still don’t seem to get fat, I don’t really worry about the Catalans drinking wine at breakfast.

Derek Thompson, a journalist I trust, wrote recently that he’s not too worked up either:

I’ve spent the past few weeks poring over studies, meta-analyses, and commentaries. I’ve crashed my web browser with an oversupply of research-paper tabs. I’ve spoken with researchers and then consulted with other scientists who disagreed with those researchers. And I’ve reached two conclusions. First, my seemingly simple question about moderate drinking may not have a simple answer. Second, I’m not making any plans to give up my nightly glass of wine.

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II. Spain’s proposed 100% tax on foreigners buying property

As it happens, I was apartment shopping for my family in Barcelona the day after Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez made headlines around the world for proposing a 100 percent real estate tax on anyone other than EU citizens.

I asked the agent showing me an apartment in Sants what he thought about it. Their agency caters to Brits and Americans, so the proposal, if passed, would effectively cripple their business.

As long as I’ve been doing this I’ve heard these kinds of proposals—they never pass, he said.

Of course, he had to say that.

I too am getting accustomed to public declarations of blame for Spain’s housing crisis falling squarely on foreigners. As I wrote in December, with 3.8 million empty homes in Spain, I don’t really think there is housing a crisis. Just a lot of people who want to live in Spain’s big, vibrant cities and not in its rural areas.

And it’s hard to blame them. But you either have to tell people they’re not allowed to move there anymore or accept that Barcelona itself is responsible for its housing crisis. The city’s own rent caps in March 2024 reportedly decreased permanent rental stock by 13 percent. And rent control always feels good in the short term, but always damages a city in the long run, eventually hurting the very low-income families it was intended to help.

Still, foreigners have always, everywhere made for easy targets if one’s country faces a problem of its own making (see: America, United States of). As Sanchez noted in his announcement, non-EU residents bought 27,000 houses and flats in Spain in 2023. That’s not nothing. But it’s also less than 5% of all properties sold.

I don’t pretend to know enough about Spanish politics to know whether the tax will pass, or not, or be passed in some watered-down form. But I do know it’s a big, shiny headline that distracts from the core problems.

But hey, that’s what politics is right now.

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III. When life is both too simple and too complicated

I’m not doing drynuary, and I don’t need to make any fitness resolutions. Catalunya is the best winter climbing destination in the world, and I’ve been getting out pretty regularly.

But one thing I felt acutely last year was a sense that my life was somehow both too simple and in some sense too complicated.

Customary disclaimer: this all represents good problems to have and enormous privilege. Everyone should be so lucky to face this problem. But it is a problem nonetheless.

Since my son went back to the U.S. to do this school year with his mom, I have been faced with the most cliché of all feelings: empty nest syndrome. He’s only 14, but in a very real way, last year marked the definitive end of his childhood and the beginning of a new phase. I watched before my eyes as he went from boy to teenager, and with that came a sense of freedom, a deliberate distancing from me his father, and toward his friend groups at school and elsewhere.

Even so, each night I got to have him at dinner and each morning see him out of the door on his way to school. And I dearly miss our Friday evening tradition volleyball games on the beach. This year, I don’t have any of that.

I also don’t have the anchor that daily Spanish classes gave me. While living in Barcelona, I was enrolled in Spanish classes for the better part of eight months, usually in the mornings from 9 to 11 a.m. The schedule grounded me and gave me a daily dose of socializing. Whatever happened the rest of the day, I felt I’d accomplished something toward a major goal of becoming conversational in Spanish. I didn’t appreciate just how anchoring that was until it was gone.

Thus, in some sense, I have too much freedom here at my property in Cornudella de Montsant—i.e., too few constraints on my time.

At the same moment, this has led to a feeling of complication. Even paralysis at times. I’m unaccustomed to making a plan of action for every single hour of every day all week, every week. There are too many choices. I could climb, work on the property, study Spanish, do client work or business development, write this newsletter, work on my book, or do any number of other activities.

Meanwhile, my financial life has started to feel legitimately complex: I am maintaining homes on two continents, with all the tax and accounting implications. I own and operate my own marketing consulting business, operating as it does entirely with U.S. clients. I own two rental properties in the U.S., plus two pieces of land.

And there’s the fixer-upper I bought here in Spain—only managing this one project could completely occupy my mental bandwidth for a year or more. Instead, the various projects of life have me feeling spread mentally thin.

Two years ago, I wrote in my annual strategic planning that it was time to take concrete steps toward simplifying my life. It’s the one goal set I feel like I’ve failed at the most. This year, I want to do better. Clear the decks. Reduce. Delete. Sell.