A 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 deals and technological advances, and that's how you get an anti-globalization populist political movement.
I was a military child, and so I moved around my whole life. My best friend has lived their whole life in the city I live in now.<p>Sometimes I get a little jealous because I don't have any heart-connection to any place. Most of the friends I regularly talk to are people I've met within the last 5 years, and I still don't have any still-standing friendships from the time before my dad retired.<p>But also, I cannot imagine that life, nor do I know if I really want to. Moving around so much gave me such a wide array of interests and cultural knowledge about places in and outside of the US. I think the benefits of that well-rounded background outweigh whatever pangs of sadness I get occasionally about not really feeling like I have a homeland.
I moved from where I grew up. The biggest advantage is access to better career paths and potential with my career. If I get laid off, there are more diverse work options, unlike where I grew up.<p>The flip side is that being able to have family help out easily when our kid is sick. Also I have friends who stayed back home (the ratio matching this article title pretty closely) and they have barbecues together, can hang out on a random night around a fire pit, watch movies in their backyard, and other fun things. About planting roots and settling down.<p>I'm really torn about these two ways of going about it. There's something very comforting about setting down roots and having a solid network of friends and family. The flip side is that you're probably leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. The history of success in America seems to lean towards being nomadic.
That is mind boggling to me. I don't know anyone that lives in the same state they grew up in. I live about 3,000 miles away from where I grew up. I have 7 siblings and none of us live in our home state (and none of us live in the same state as another one - we live in NY, CA, MI, TX, OR, OH, UT, CO - we grew up in FL).<p>Though, I remember that one of my brothers once lived in Pennsylvania and he met 2 women who had never left their county and were amazed that he lived in so many other places and wondered out loud if he had been scared to live in places other than where he lived right then in PA. The mind set that other places are scary to live in is so foreign to me.
I'm a child of expats who became an expat. Lived in over a dozen countries.<p>Sometimes I feel like an enlightened citizen moving about. Sometimes I feel like I'm perpetually living in an airport. To quote fight-club, single serving friends and nothing ever stays.<p>Which is to say, i did me, but i don't see anything wrong at all with staying put.
I don't think many commenters in this thread realize the minuscule size of a human and how the things which most impact our happiness are located in our close proximity and surroundings. It's almost like a physical law , the weight that something has on our happiness diminishes exponentially with the distance from ourselves. The importance of the setup is constantly underappreciated.<p>Each and everyone of us has 150 people in their circle of acquaintances . And 90% of our happiness depends on the quality of our relationship with the top 10 people in such list.<p>Similarly with the external enviornment. 90% of our happiness depends on the conditions of the external enviornment in a radius of 300 yds.<p>It's very easy to be blinded by the lights of NYC or Hollywood, but those megalopolis are incredibly big and again humans are so small.<p>A good setup in Albuquerque or Salt Lake City beats a mediocre setup in NYC or LA every day of the week.<p>Sure the Empire State Building is nice to look at,but it gets old fast, especially while you see it in passing while on your way to be screamed at by your boss at your second job that you had to take because you can't make the rent.<p>Given how small humans are, the ideal setup can be everywhere except for maybe Somalia or Congo. But even then if you are the undisputed king of Somalia, that's much better than being an Investment Banker in NYC. Despite the fact that a block in NYC generates more GDP than the entire country of Somalia,the claim of the king on such small GDP is almost total, whereas an investment banker has zero claim on the GDP being produced in a block in NYC, he has zero claim on anything period.<p>I think it was Julius Caesar who said: "I would rather be first in a little village than second in Rome".
All IMHO of course: we'd be better off if it was 9 of 10. The family is the most important institution we have, it is the backbone driving the most valuable members of our society. The stronger and more cohesive it is the better.<p>There's a countervailing factor which is that more earnings and economic output arise from jobs in urban areas, which historically can only happen if some members relocate.<p>Hopefully the trend towards remote work helps alleviate this conflict.
60% of young adults live within the metro area they grew up in, at age 26.<p>That's not surprising, especially with how many college graduates move home now.<p>I wouldn't be surprised if a substantial amount of the remainder stay near where they colleged.
We have become an increasingly urbanized country. Lots and lots of people in massive metro areas—think of the hypersprawl around Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, LA…<p>Living 10 miles away from where you grew up around Chicago can put you in a total different socioeconomic level of suburb.
I moved away from my Midwest hometown in my early twenties, lived in Seattle for nearly a decade, then got fed up with the path the city was on and moved back. I feel like moving away is valuable, and teaches you to appreciate the things you took for granted living somewhere during your childhood. Now that I’m back, I get to help fundamentally transform the city into a new tech hub, reviving from the state of decay produced by an industry that mostly abandoned it. This has been extremely fulfilling in a way that living in an already established big city cannot — the skyline is yours to help manifest.
So 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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:<p><pre><code> 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
</code></pre>
I think about that too.
Ten miles is huge in an increasingly urbanized world. Within a ten miles radius from where I lived in 2017 there was some of the most expensive housing in the world and ghettos with weekly gang shootings. However the city I lived in is objectively regarded as one of the best places to live in the world: Copenhagen, Denmark.
This just seems insane to me.<p>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).<p>When I talk to most of my friends it is a similar story.<p>I just can't imagine not wanting to explore a new area and have distance from your parents. I love my parents, we talk a couple times a week, but I don't need them physically close to me. (last couple years being the exception for obvious reasons).<p>Maybe this is because I am gay and I needed out of the south (as are many of my friends), I also wanted to move to an urban city like so many in my generation.<p>This just seems insane for me to think about.
I am currently very conflicted about this. I grew up in India but was fortunate to live in the US and now in Europe for undergrad/grad school. I am (slightly) older than the demographic in the article. I am planning on settling down with my girlfriend soon, after I finish some career related stuff. If I want to start a family, I really want to move back to my hometown in India, with the strong social support system. While moving around has been exciting and an eye-opening experience, I am tired of constantly making new friends and leaving them after a few years, and miss my family some times, and eventually the kids would benefit from being around their grandparents. On the other hand, moving back would be career limiting.<p>Does anybody who is further along on the journey have any advice? How did you make this decision?
It's really too bad that people have to move around for economic and other opportunity. It kind of speaks to the damaged modern psyche with illnesses like schizophrenia virtually absent in the ancient world that anyone would regard not dispersing from their home area as a bad thing. Like, we all just aspire to the condition of the multi-national economic elite, paying allegiance to no country or place, making an abode of bouncing around a few world cities.<p>Like, maybe we just shouldn't have crappy places that people need to flee, by putting roots in the community and making it a place to be.
This is is an important detail missing from the title:<p>"Childhood locations are measured at age 16 and locations in young adulthood are measured at age 26."<p>"By linking young adults to their parents, we can see that this migration is primarily driven by individuals who grew up in affluent families."<p>It's not all young adults, just a specific demographic we would expect to move away farther from home.<p>Many people in this thread are using this to confirm their bias that it says something about the young adults. The title is doing more harm than good.
A friend of mine lives in a town in the Midwest and often wonders why there are so many hardworking people in California struggling to make ends meet when the foundry in his town is looking for anyone who can show up to work on-time and sober, is paying overtime (b/c there aren't enough workers), and is willing to train people. All in a town where you can buy a house for under $200k.<p>People don't move. We like to talk about FOMO, but fear of making major changes is much bigger.
When 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.
Good to know my siblings are representative: we're 3 of 5 living within 10 miles of where we grew up. I'm 2000 miles away (other coast), and the youngest sibling is about 500 miles away. This (likely) works even given the 26 years old milestone. I wasn't quite so far away yet, but still a few hundred miles away. The youngest sibling isn't 26 yet, but I don't expect them to move back in time to change the count.<p>I'd like to make bold, sweeping claims about which is better, but I don't have any. I've moved the most, and because of that make the highest salary of any of my siblings. (The other sibling who moved is likely second, but possibly not due to being younger in their career.) Because of my location it's going to be hard to be a good uncle to my first niece, due in January. There are definite trade-offs involved in moving.<p>I moved back in with my parents during the pandemic to provide support for some health issues, since I had the ability work remote easily during that time. It was great to be back local for that time, though there were obviously some confounding factors due to the personal and societal health issues in 2020.
I have nothing to back this up, but it feels like this has probably been the rule for most of human history, and it was just that unusual period in the 20th century where things may have been different for a while. We tend to measure everything against that period, which may someday be recognized as a specific kind of fallacy. Again, I have no data in this case, and am not going to look any up.
If you say that periods where people move a lot are "mobile" periods, and periods where people stay put a lot are not "mobile" periods, than this is one of the <i>least</i> mobile periods in our modern history, despite what you may believe about remote work and transplants and gentrification. [1]<p>Of course, this is because housing is more expensive than it has ever been. It costs too much damn money to move, even if economic opportunity is better than it used to be.<p>A lot of ink being spilled in this thread about non-mobile people being bitter about the lack of opportunity in their hometown. That may be part of it, but I think the far larger and more important part is that it is <i>too fucking expensive</i> for them to move! In large part because of all of the people who did move away and got their fancy degrees and then financialized the whole economy so badly.<p>[1] <a href="https://archive.vn/8ecXR" rel="nofollow">https://archive.vn/8ecXR</a>
I'm not familiar with the research in this area, but what exactly separates an adult from a young adult (for the purposes of research on the labour force, not biology), and why study them specifically? 60% of young adults don't move, how does that differ from the rest of the workforce? Retirees?
So glad that my military upbringing has been instilled in all my kids.<p>All of us has been to at least 7 different states/countries, me almost 12! Even "towed" our elders with us, and they love it too.<p>Cannot imagine being in a one-town ... forever.<p>Always seeking different cultures.<p>We must be explorers!
I would say that I owe my career to <i>not</i> staying in my home town or even my home state. The state has plenty of charms but opportunity is generally speaking not among them. Those of my graduating high school class who I've followed since also moved out of state. Looking at the data from this tool it seems we were outliers, though.<p>With remote work being more common now I could probably move back, but that would carry some amount of risk as long as I'm working for another company rather than running a business of my own. Where I live now has a decent balance between locally available jobs and cost of living which is a bit scary to give up.
While I am not within the 60%, I live about 80km from where I grew up (basically the same metro area), and I feel fortunate enough to not have to move very far for my career. I have only ever worked remote, and truly love where I live.<p>I have traveled to most US states and about a dozen countries, and wouldn't trade my home for any of them. The structural advantages (family, friends, regional knowledge, activities) are tremendous. If you are planning to have children, having parents/relatives around to share in the childcare is an enormous financial advantage.
I wish the data explorer also showed per-capita moving rates. It's hard to tell if a place is sending proportionately more migrants to another place or if the source just starts with a high population.
I think I count as one of the six. Since I live in an expensive and affluent area, I think I am one of the few people who lives close to where they grew up. In my opinion, moving away gives you more opportunity and life experiences. It is a very US American and “immigrant” thing to do. Personally, I haven’t taken that route because I have no idea what my living situation would be like and I think it would probably be worse for me in terms of psychology and social life.
Wow, I really did not expect it to be that high. I could understand that number if it was "live in the state where they grew up" (esp. if they went to college in-state which most do), but within 10 miles? That's a pretty small radius. In many cities you could move to the other side of town and be outside the 10 mile range.
I'd be interested to see this data weighted against population density. As-is, I suspect it's massively tilted by how in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, or NYC you can go 5 miles and practically be in a different country.
I live not far from where I grew up--I moved away and lived in NYC for a while, but eventually came back. I live only about a mile from where my great-grandparents lived when they first came to the US from Romania.
If I had become a doctor or a hotelier I definitely would've stayed in my home town. I miss it greatly, but there's zero tech presence and remote jobs seem to be drying up.
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.
i had the best of both worlds. moved from my hometown to seattle for while, made a lot of money in tech, bought and sold a house in seattle at the right time, moved back to my hometown. now i have a paid off house 5 mins from the house i lived in during high school. i was able to keep the seattle salary so now i am living like a king in my old hometown, honestly its amazing
I detect a bit of defensiveness in the comments. I also detect a certain egalitarian undertow almost tending toward "everyone should move around" or "no one should move around". There is a third option: some people benefit from moving around. And we may also speak of the social consequences of migration, both for the origin and target societies.<p>I would say this:<p>- Moving around isn't for everyone.<p>- There is a tinge of oikophobia that's common in much of the West today that makes the thought of caring for and willing the genuine good of your own people frightening to many, inconvenient, and for some reason synonymous with chauvinism or some weird exclusivity that construes benevolence as "either/or" instead of in subsidiarian terms. Soon, the mere general <i>prioritization</i> of the good of one's own family members (a duty) will come off as "not inclusive" and "inequitable".<p>- Statistically, there is a certain healthy amount of average migration of certain kinds (the specifics will vary). Some spice enhances the flavor of a soup, but too little leaves it bland, and too much overpowers it.<p>- Travel and living elsewhere can help deprovincialize the mind, but do not guarantee it.<p>- Social networks and social order are important. Note the principle of subsidiary. A human being typically grows up in a family that is itself nwsted within an extended family and a community and so on, like layers of an onion. People typically become alienated when removed from them.<p>- As people get older, it becomes more common to settle down and commit oneself to the good of some particular community (original or adopted) instead of spending one's life drifting anonymously.<p>- One of the big incentives behind traveling or living in different places is to learn about other cultures. But if <i>everyone</i> were moving around, no local culture would ever have the chance to develop because locality requires continuity and a stable, sustaining local population, i.e., a true society. Places with very high rates of inward and outward migration tend to be less distinctive and tend to resemble other hubs of the same kind with which they likely swap inhabitants. If that's what attracts you, then your travelling or moving around isn't motived by a desire to learn about other cultures so much as a desire for a change of scenery while maintaining a more or less consistent, homogenous cultural "experience" globally. It's like being an American who goes on vacation and never talks to the locals, only other Americans in the hotel, or one who wants the "locals" to be like Americans.<p>- There is, of course, a difference between frequent moving and living more than 10 miles away from where you grew up.<p>I attach moral judgement to neither "remaining in the area" nor "living far away" nor even "moving frequently". These are quite personal matters per se.
I grew up about a hour from DC and an hour from Richmond. Had I stayed, I don’t think I would have made it very far as a developer or had the chance to live an interesting life.