I think you may have misinterpreted the statistic about moving 6 times in a lifetime. That’s less than once per decade, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re moving away from their friends and family.
In America, it’s common to buy a “starter home” as your first house and then move to progressively nicer houses throughout your life as you can afford different houses.
Some people do choose to move to different cities for jobs or families, but it’s not true that we’re all moving away from friends over again.
If your only experiences in America were traveling to large, expensive cities then you likely saw a disproportionately large number of job-related moves. It’s common for people in big cities to move there for career purposes for a while before relocating elsewhere to raise families later. If you were primarily talking to people at bars or after-work social events, your sample size was likely biased away from typical people with families, who generally are spending time with their children rather than out socializing after work.
When we do move away, it’s common to maintain friendships remotely and coordinate return visits. Most people don’t simply forget their friends after moving.
I’m always fascinated to read outside descriptions of Americans on the Internet because they so often don’t resemble life here at all. Then again, whenever I read Reddit and Twitter it feels like many Americans are describing exaggerated versions of cherry-picked edge cases as if they were normal life here, so I can see how it happens.
This is one of the reasons I like the non-technical threads on HN that much (myself being uber technical): you have often well-balanced people providing a reasonable (and often sourced) perspective on topics I have a faint idea about.
This is also why I am trying to push my teen children to read HN, so that they get a really unique perspective from a dynamic source, where they can quickly select the points interesting to them (as opposed to, say, tech or sociological magazines where you need to have a interest to read longer articles). It sometimes work :)
Without sounding like HN marketing dept, it is actually sad that it is not advertised more in these circles (teenagers) who could benefit from the discussions. My children go to very good schools and exactly nobody there ever heard of HN (not one single person)
I've absorbed a lot of good information from HN comments, but I hate to say that the signal to noise ratio is not particularly high in 2020. Reading the comment section without a significant degree of skepticism could result in a lot of misinformation.
I didn't fully understand how off the mark the HN comment section could be until reading the comments for topics and companies I was closely familiar with. There are a lot of very confident posts here from people who don't really understand what they're talking about, mixed in with some great posts from people who know exactly what they're talking about. Take everything with a grain of salt.
I agree that there are plenty of incorrect comments, but that's life everywhere... You can't enforce truth for every comment, and especially not in a place with such general discussion.
Also, I've been reading HN for around a decade now, and I actually disagree that it's gotten worse. I like HN of 2020 too!
Are there any other similar sites that are better? (Asking seriously, I'd like to know!)
So if I have a choice to make, I prefer to push them towards a source where people who write nonsense are more likely to be corrected than a place where tribalism or conformism is so high that another opinion does not have a chance.
All of this is the introduction to discussions between us afterwards (where they get one more biased opinion - mine), but I prefer the topics they would get from HN than Instagram.
As an example, we spent a good amont of time yesterday when he brought up the case of a child (11 yo) that paid for the artwork of his mother. It was a very interesting exchange of opinions about what parents and children are entitled to vs responsibilities vs casual money management etc.
For example, many of people's ~10 moves happen in their 20s when they're starting and establishing their lives, career, etc and even then most move are in the same county. Most likely they don't have kids yet and almost definitely haven't bought a home, so there are few roots.
But on the other end, by the time someone is 40, they'll likely only move 1-2 more times.
Still probably not good but not as bad as you might think.
Anecdotally: From my own life, I moved 3 times before graduating high school (same school district), 5 times in my 20s, 1 time in my 30s, and probably again in the next few years.
I can't imagine living somewhere for so long. And I'm far from a diplomat brat.
- home with the parents in one place until college
- then college in an another city or around their place (and so they stay with the parents), maybe a 50/50 split
- then they move for a job
This is 2-3 places.
Again, everyone is different and it depends on many factors, this is data from maybe 20 or 30 people (we've been discussing a lot about that recently as we have children who go or will shortly go to college and we were comparing them to us)
I read somewhere that they move about 6 times in their lives and that children are used to get friendly quickly because it will not last. I would say that the general superficial openness of Americans supports this (to be clear: there is no negativity in that expression - it is actually the only reasonable way to live a normal life in a quickly changing world of "friends").
I do not have scientific data about that - it is just what I read and the ~30 times I travelled to the US and met some people there (both in larger cities and in remote areas - but mostly larger cities and tech people).
I am French and we do not move much. We stay with our parents a long time, possibly go somewhere to study but a lot of people will not move spontaneously.
It is not unusual to have friends form a very young age - my children go to high school with the ones they went to kindergarten, all this right next to Paris.
I think that it is even more pronounced in Italy.