If I wasn't engaged I would have gone home to WFH immediately during the pandemic, it would have been nice to spend time there and be with family (rare opportunity for easy ability to work remotely and spend time with family on the east coast).
That said, most of the successful people I know moved out to areas with more opportunity and those that stayed behind (particularly those that live at home) are more likely to have 'personal failings' of some sort.
Maybe this isn't true if you were lucky enough to grow up in an economic hub to start, but if you didn't there's still some truth to it.
Obviously during the pandemic this changes and no longer becomes relevant since remote opportunity and being able to save money by living home (since everything is locked down anyway) makes way more sense. Most people don't think independently from the cultural context though so it'd take a while for this to update.
Why live in Palo Alto and waste lots of money on rent because of stupid housing policy when you don't have to? When you can't go out and do stuff?
I hear sentiments like this a lot lately, and it feels short-sighted to me. COVID restrictions are not going to be around forever. There are financial, professional, social, and other costs that come with moving somewhere else.
For people who genuinely don't like it in $HCOL_AREA regardless of the pandemic, and see this as a way to get out permanently, then that's great, and they should do that. If it's more like "it's expensive here and I can't go out to my favorite bars/restaurants right now", the latter half of that situation should fix itself by next summer, and hopefully earlier in some fashion. Sure, that's a while to wait, but isn't much time when considering that an alternative is to uproot your entire life.
Still a year or so where it's not worth it.
Maybe that's not enough for some people to be worth the effort, but if your lease was ending and you don't have a ton of stuff it's pretty easy to do.
> That said, most of the successful people I know moved out to areas with more opportunity and those that stayed behind (particularly those that live at home) are more likely to have 'personal failings' of some sort.
Sounds like you are almost defining "personal failings" as "unable to gain the skills to compete and thrive in a high opportunity area".
If that's the case, perhaps we should reconsider whether such a high level of achievement should be required in order for a person to establish a basic non extravagant life on their own independent of their parents.
In the US context, it has historical connections to the glorification of pioneerism and expansion through the western frontier (along with the genocide that accompanied that).
After that, in the post WW2 period, opportunity in the US was so abundant that a (commonly white male) school dropout could walk into a factory and get a job with benefits. The same person could then afford a modest house (not the gigantic houses of today), support a family on a single income, and had access to affordable health care and good public education for their kids.
In the context of that sort of opportunity, staying at your parents' home in adulthood was far more indicative of personal failings, and that's where the current trope disparaging adult (mostly male) children living at home originated.
But given how diminished all of those opportunities are today (no lands to forcibly take from less technologically advantaged peoples, no new factories, expensive housing where jobs are available, high qualifications required), it's a trope that's pretty irrelevant today.