Stockholm vs Marbella, after living in both

We packed up the house in Sweden in 2018. The plan was incredibly simple. We would move the family to Marbella for two years, soak up some sun, learn a bit of Spanish, and then go back to our normal routines in Stockholm. I had stepped back from Mediapilot, the company Fredrik Bage and I built over roughly seven years, and I was doing commercial work with Happeo. It felt like the perfect window for a brief sabbatical in the south. Six years later, we are still here. Whenever I go back to Sweden, people ask me which city is better. They want a definitive answer. They want me to either validate their decision to stay in the north or convince them to pack their bags. I usually disappoint them.

The machinery of the North

Stockholm is a city built on trust. That sounds abstract, but you feel it in the actual mechanics of daily life. When Fredrik and I started our agency in our mid-twenties, we had basically nothing. I was coming off a commission-only sales gig at a PR agency that everyone told me not to take, but Fredrik told me I would be good at sales, so we backed ourselves. Building a company in Sweden was structurally easy. The public systems function with a quiet, reliable hum. The banks work. The tax authority is heavily digital and surprisingly helpful to new founders. If you say you are going to do something, people believe you. I spent my formative years there, creating over a hundred jobs, and I benefited massively from that high-trust society. On top of that, my oldest friends are there. There is a specific kind of comfort in sitting across a dinner table from someone who knew you before you figured out what you wanted to do with your life. You do not have to explain your background to them. They were there for it.

You do not move to southern Spain for the civic efficiency, but you rarely stay in Sweden for the light.

The sun-drenched alternative

Then you have Marbella. I will be honest with you, the bureaucracy here can be maddening. Getting a simple piece of paper stamped sometimes requires three different appointments at three different offices, none of which seem to talk to each other. But the trade-off hits you as soon as you walk outside. The light changes how you operate on a biological level. In Stockholm, November is a dark, wet month you simply try to survive. In southern Spain, it is a month you spend outdoors. I play tennis here constantly. I am quite bad at it, but I play often, and almost always in the sun. That physical environment bleeds into everything else, especially family time. We eat dinner later, we spend weekends outside, and the general hum of stress is noticeably lower.

What surprised me most about Marbella, though, was the people. I expected tourists and retirees playing golf. Instead, I found a high-energy density of interesting foreigners. There are entrepreneurs, investors, and weird, brilliant builders from all over Europe who decided they wanted to control their own environment. You end up having coffee with a German software founder, a British angel investor, and a Danish designer, all in the same week. Because it is a transient place, friendships form quickly. People are open because almost everyone is an outsider. This environment has been exactly what I needed to build my current projects, like Anchor and Substrat. It gives you the space to build quietly, away from the specific social expectations of your hometown.

The tiebreaker that does not exist

Since roughly 2010, I have kept a written life plan. Every year, I sit down and rate different areas of my life out of ten. I score family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time. I write down what I got wrong, what failed, and what needs fixing. I can look back at the spreadsheets from my Stockholm years and compare them directly to my Marbella years. The truth is, the total scores do not look all that different. The composition just shifts.

In Stockholm, work momentum and deep, historical friendships scored higher. The machinery of the city pulled me forward professionally. In Marbella, family time, personal health, and my own daily energy take the lead. The systems in Sweden are objectively better at a state level. The quality of a random Tuesday afternoon in Spain is objectively better at a human level. I haven't got this figured out entirely, and I refuse to declare one vastly superior to the other. Right now, building AI tools for alienated fathers and infrastructure for developers feels right to do from the Spanish coast. Next year, when I update my plan, I might realise I miss the northern machinery. Until then, I will keep playing bad tennis in the sun.