I moved away from home but I moved back as well. I now live within 10 miles of where I grew up, but I spent 7 years in the sf bay area, 2000 miles away.
Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up
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Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it's just the area. I'm in the Philly suburbs and while I love it here I cannot express how little people travel. Even going downtown is a "big deal" if you've grown up to believe either, 1. Cities are awful dangerous places with no value 2. Strip malls and chain restaurants are the pinnacle of civilization When I moved from Bucks County to Chester County I was "moving away" and many people just wrote me off. D…
I notice I do not hang out with people that live further than 30min (reliably). I might be willing to make the trek if I was single, but with kids and spouse, it becomes too time consuming for my taste.
30min away is about the limit for "eh, let's go over" - anything more and you're talking planning, etc.
This is the reason people are willing to commute so damn far; you're forced to commute but if you're not near your friends, you'll never see them again.
Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not ever feeling any kind of culture shock is itself limiting.
This is a privileged opinion, no? Not everyone has the resources or means to leave the place they live.
Not everyone has the resources or means to stay where they are. The Great Recession flung people far and wide.
I am not disagreeing with you though, just two sides of the issue re resources.
Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up
#74I've regularly read that most people in the world live and die within 50 miles of where they were born. Even now that travel is so common.
Travel is common for the top 10-20% richest people in the world.
For 80% of the world, travel is something that 'other people' do.
Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up
#75When I was growing up I always thought this was kind of a sign of, like, giving up, so I'm surprised the numbers are so high. I guess not everyone was thinking the same way.
Most Americans live in and around big cities. Ive lived my entire life in commuting distance to Manhattan along with 10s of millions others. There was never any notion from myself or my peers of having to move to "make it". The end goal was always to find a job and get on a bus or train every morning.
Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up
#76A lot of upperwardly mobile, ambitious people don't realize this, or they generally understand it only in terms of chastising their high school peers who stayed home. If you build a society based on the assumption everyone will simply move and re-skill to the regions with economic opportunity, you get a lot of regions of bitter people who stayed behind somewhere and watched their local economy get destroyed by trade…
Part of it, as well, is that a lot of these regions that people moved out of are the suburbs. Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading.
Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up
#77This just seems insane to me. I purposefully graduated early from highschool (1 semester less and it only worked because of where my birthday was) to move 853 miles from where I grew up to where I currently live. My partner did a similar move (before we met). When I talk to most of my friends it is a similar story. I just can't imagine not wanting to explore a new area and have distance from your parents. I love my p…
It seems insane to me to think about taking to my parents weekly. I know they exist, I don’t need to talk to them. What seems unimaginable to one of us is not just normal but desirable to the other. The same is true for deciding where to live.
Just to clarify, what I find insane is the numbers because it doesn't line up with my experience within most of the people I generally talk too
Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up
#78This just seems insane to me. I purposefully graduated early from highschool (1 semester less and it only worked because of where my birthday was) to move 853 miles from where I grew up to where I currently live. My partner did a similar move (before we met). When I talk to most of my friends it is a similar story. I just can't imagine not wanting to explore a new area and have distance from your parents. I love my p…
Here's my 2c (I'm 30 for the record):
I was born in a flyover state. There's ~no coding jobs here, and the ones that are here, pay pittances compared to anywhere not adjacent to a (feed)corn field.
I moved 250 miles away (to the other side of my state... dang is the US huge) to take a tech job that payed closer to what coastal companies will pay.
The next step was probably to move to Seattle or SF and take a "real" tech job there. But two things happened at the same time:
1. remote work really grew up. now I can work from anywhere and (mostly. geo-adjusting etc. luckily that seems to be on the decline.) get paid well.
2. We had our first child. Now suddenly close access to our support network (parents etc) is both logistically important ("hey mom can you watch the kids for a weekend so we can sleep") and emotionally important (grandparents getting to see the kids every weekend or two instead of significantly less often).
So now instead of looking to move an additional 2k miles away, I moved back to be ~2 miles from one set of parents and ~20 miles from the other set.
I'm not really thrilled about the local jobs or local politics etc. But family is incredibly important to have physically close, and so here I am. Thank heavens for remote coding jobs.
Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up
#79A lot of upperwardly mobile, ambitious people don't realize this, or they generally understand it only in terms of chastising their high school peers who stayed home. If you build a society based on the assumption everyone will simply move and re-skill to the regions with economic opportunity, you get a lot of regions of bitter people who stayed behind somewhere and watched their local economy get destroyed by trade…
It's funny how globalised the anti-globalisation populist political movements may be. Yesterday's news included "Reichsbürger" getting busted in Deutschland for conspiring to coup, and it was mentioned the suspects were also pretty QAnon-aligned. However, Reichsbürger are not indigenous, but are derived from US "Sovereign Citizens", who result from an amalgam of nuttery derived from XIX and XX conspiracies wishing to stand athwart history yelling "stop!": from those who thought the 14A is bogus to those who thought the 16A is bogus to those who didn't care for the Civil Rights Act, etc. Anyway, all these conspiracies apparently became more mainstream in the 1970s US because of the many newly embittered people due to the farming policies of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz .
(incidentally, our farming policy here is diametrically opposed to both "get big or get out" and "plant fencerow to fencerow", and we still have major political centre parties, as well as left and right wing parties. But that correlation may have no relation to causation...)
Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up
#80So my family has long described ourselves as nomadic. We just seem to get the wanderlust and want to pick up and move after some years in some place. I myself have lived in 5 different countries so far.
My great-grandfather (who died long before I was born) was a fairly extreme example of this. Shortly before WWI he decided to jump on a boat in Germany and immigrate to Australia (coming originally from the Baltic states). It seems like a fortuitous time to leave Europe.
I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that. His brother did basically the same thing (although in his case he was partly motivated by escaping getting conscripted into the Army). His story is fascinating too. A book was even written about it. He actually found an abandoned boat, fixed it up, made his own instruments and sailed to America in the 1930s across the Pacific Ocean because he always wanted to visit America.
I think about that and wonder what is it about some people who seem to be constantly restless while others seem content to staying pretty much exactly where they were born. I don't really understand that mindset but in some ways I envy it.
One of the most culturally identifiable songs to Australians is a song from the 1970s called Khe Sanh by a band named Cold Chisel. It's quite literally about a Vietnam vet with PTSD. it has a verse that goes like this:
And I've traveled 'round the world from year to year
And each one found me aimless, one more year the worse for wear
And I've been back to Southeast Asia, and the answer sure ain't there
But I'm drifting north, to check things out again, yes, I am