Introducing QUALITY of LIFE in El Paso | SERIES | Happiness

Introducing QUALITY of LIFE in El Paso | SERIES | Happiness

Hi, my name is John Peña with Peña El Paso Realty Group. Thank you so much for checking out the YouTube channel. If you are looking to buy or sell a home, please consider reaching out to us as we pride ourselves on the best real estate company here in El Paso.

And with that in mind, one thing that we talk about a lot on this channel is just the overall city, right? What's El Paso like? What's the cost of living?

What are the pros and cons? What's the real estate market like? But I've recently been attending something called the Neighborhood Leadership Academy, which is totally free.

It's set up by the city and basically it tells you everything that you could possibly want to know about El Paso. It's awesome. I'm going to do a video on it, but it's gotten me thinking a lot about quality of life and

so much so that we're going to start a new series about El Paso's quality of life. In a nutshell, you can define quality of life by the standard of health, comfort, and happiness experienced by an individual or a group. There are even websites that take data surveys and they basically rank different countries

and cities for their quality of life. Basically we're going to use Numbeo, it's the site that we found had the highest quality, and they break quality of life for a city into eight categories. Housing power, safety, health care, climate, cost of living, property price to income ratio,

traffic, commute time, and pollution. And we're going to do an episode on every single one of these categories in the future here. But in a nutshell, El Paso ranks very, very high across all of those categories except

pollution and we're going to address that as well. So for today, honestly I really wanted to talk more about introducing the series and talking about happiness because recently I was going through the YouTube comments and came across a post from a gentleman and in a nutshell he said that his friends had convinced

him to move to El Paso. He had already done everything there was to do in El Paso. He was bored, he didn't like the city, and he doesn't talk to his friends anymore and essentially it was obvious that this person was not happy.

So here's a great example of somebody who moved to a new city and essentially was unhappy. And I wanted to speak to that just a little bit because regardless of whether you're moving to El Paso, Florida, California, a different country, happiness is something that's really, really important and I don't want people to think that somehow by moving to El Paso

you are going to magically be happy. Now if health and comfort are important to you and that's going to make you happy, well El Paso might make you happy. For instance, if you live in the north and you just hate winters and snow and blizzards

and ice and your happiness is dependent on your comfort level, well if you move to El Paso or someplace in the south, well yeah, it's likely that your happiness will increase. However, most people's happiness is not dependent on health or comfort. I'm going to propose that essentially you are not going to find happiness in any city

that you live in unless you have some type of human connection. And so I just wanted to talk briefly as we introduce this series about this idea of happiness. How do you find happiness when you move to a city? And let's kind of jump right into it.

So for some people, that human connection is going to be in the form of family. We have tons of people who maybe grew up in El Paso, they still have family here and now they're moving back, right? And so if you have family in El Paso and you move back, well that's going to be a source

of human connection and that's likely going to contribute to your happiness, right? However, most people, including myself and Leah, we moved to El Paso and decided to settle down here and we don't have any family here and we didn't know anybody and so human connection for us, we had to find in essentially either friends or community.

So friends, if you move to a new city and you don't have any friends, you're going to be lonely and that's likely going to lead to unhappiness, right? So there has to be something said for this idea that when you move to a new city, you have to take some initiative to try and find friends, right?

There's no place you move to where you're going to show up in town, nobody knows you and all of these strangers are going to come to you and just want to be your friends, right? That's never going to happen, it's just not, okay? Now even though I always say that El Paso is a super friendly place, it doesn't mean

that people are just going to knock on your door and say, hey, saw that you moved in, can we be friends, alright? It's not going to happen. So how are you going to find these friends?

You're either going to have to take the initiative to go out and be social, maybe attend the different events and festivals which we talk about here all the time, maybe you're going to have to join some meetup groups, or another great opportunity is to find other people with similar interests, similar hobbies, right?

And if you're single, of course you can start dating, right? So that's the friends side of the human connection. The other side of the human connection, and this is where I think I can be helpful to that gentleman maybe in the comments, is you can find human connection through the community,

right? For instance, my biggest piece of advice is honestly, if you want to develop and have some more human connection that might lead to more happiness in wherever you are, think about volunteering.

Volunteering is the best, quickest, easiest way to basically feel good about yourself because you're doing something good for others, and guess what? Meet other people who might become friends for you. And then the other thing, and we're going to talk about this in the series, is that

a great way to find human connection is to kind of turn over a new leaf. And by that, I mean start to do something that maybe you haven't done before. Do something that, you know, maybe the city, El Paso, provides for you. For instance, I have two examples of something that Lee and I have done.

Number one is we've gotten into something called overlanding. Overlanding is something that's very common, especially out here in the desert, where essentially it's kind of like traveling with an RV, but essentially you don't have an RV. You likely have a 4x4 vehicle, and you outfit it so that essentially it's like a rolling

hotel room, right? You can put a rooftop tent on it, you can put a refrigerator in there, deck it out, do all of that stuff, and it's a great way to explore, and it's also a great way to meet other people who are into this same thing, right?

Another example is, for me at least, trail running, right? Where I lived before, I didn't really get into trail running because I was into sports that had to do more with water. Now that I'm here, and there's no lakes and oceans for me to do that sport in anymore,

now I've transitioned to picking up a new sport, trail running, and guess what? This has been a way for me to meet new people, find community, and find some of that human connection that way. So, I'm really excited for this Quality of Life series, but I think it's really important

to stress that, and I say this with complete love to everybody out there, but if you are miserable in whatever city or place you're currently in, moving to El Paso or any other city is likely not going to make you any less miserable, right? What makes us miserable is what lives within us, right?

Our worries, our fears, our anxieties, and unfortunately, wherever you go, there you are. You're taking those with you. And so, we certainly don't want to give people the impression that El Paso is like this kind

of magical fairyland where if you move here, you're suddenly going to be happy and everything's going to go your way and you're going to have the best life ever. That's not how life works, which I'm sure everybody knows. But like I said, I thought it was a great way to kind of start off this Quality of Life

series. I think you're going to find it really, really interesting, like I said, when it comes down to those different categories, El Paso does rank super, super high, and it's going to be fun to kind of show that and compare to other cities and to talk about the things

that aren't so good. I'm also going to be talking about the windstorms, the dust storms here, which we haven't talked about enough. And so, I hope that gives you a general idea of kind of where we're going with this Quality

of Life series. By all means, please consider subscribing to the channel. And even more so, if you agree, don't agree, by all means, please consider commenting. We do look at those and, you know, even from this episode, you can see that we do sometimes

take those into account when we have the videos. So, thank you so much for your time. We'll see you in the next episode.