The migration is about the different things one wants during the course of one’s life.
Perhaps you could rephrase the concept around “if you stay at home you might miss out on some of the opportunities your peers experienced” if you want to look at both sides you could consider the benefits of community family and friends that those who stay are able to enjoy.
What you're describing is true, but also different from what the original comment is talking about. There is a global trend to urbanization, yes. The original comment isn't talking about moving from rural to urban; what they say applies to moving from one city to another.
Moreover, at an individual scale, moving for better opportunities doesn't mean one has to leave family and friends. For example, my grandma: she was very poor, and moved a few times different cities looking for a better life. This meant moving with her whole family, and/or moving where other family was. After she married my grandpa, he got job opportunities in both Guadalajara and Mexico City. I'm sure they could've done better in Mexico City, since it's the capital, but they chose Guadalajara due to proximity to family. Her mom eventually moved to Guadalajara too.
Another, more recent example from my family: my uncle. He had the opportunity to move for a very good job, but didn't take it since it was far from family. My brother moved cities for college, but specifically to one where he would be close to family.
One thing is moving wherever it takes for the sake of going to a specific school, working at a specific job, living in a specific dream home or dream city. That is very American. Another one is still looking for opportunities, but framing everything in terms of your family and friends; ie, what's the best job, school, home I can find close to my family? That's much more Latin American and much less common, in my experience, in the USA.
It used to be far more common to move for economic opportunity and put down new roots far from previous friends and family.
– Mariana Ruiz del Valle
This meaning of "leaving home" as a cultural trend, I see it as part of the modern historical period that has passed its peak. We're living in the natural and logical result, and searching for a way back home.
> The modern era is closely associated with the development of individualism, capitalism, urbanization, and a belief in the positive possibilities of technological and political progress.
> It has been a period of significant development in the fields of science, politics, warfare, and technology. It has also been an Age of Discovery and globalization. During this time, the European powers and later their colonies, strengthened its political, economic, and cultural colonization of the rest of the world. It also created a new modern lifestyle and has permanently changed the way people around the world live.
> In the 19th and early 20th century, modernist art, politics, science, and culture have come to dominate not only Western Europe and North America, but almost every area on the globe, including movements thought of as opposed to the western world and globalization.
> The brutal wars and other conflicts of this era, many of which come from the effects of rapid change, and the connected loss of strength of traditional religious and ethical norms, have led to many reactions against modern development.
edit found this https://themortgagepoint.com/2024/08/20/most-americans-stay-...
Someone 45 minutes away might as well require a flight, as far as I’m concerned
(I know that's not the real inverse square equation just having fun)
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-myth-of-the-loneliness...
I lived 7 miles from a close friend. I liked getting to go to his place once a month or so. He lives in a large apartment complex. One friend moved into the same building. They see each other several times a week and his children go over to visit these friends whenever they feel like it. Similarly another friend moved a block away and they see each other far more regularly.
I live 300 miles from where I grew up. Going to "back home" to visit is a big deal and so we don't do it often. Not only is two days lost in travel (technically it is 5-6 hours to drive, but it still wastes most of the day); we can't go home to our beds and so that means we need to get a hotel or sleep on floors - both have downsides. Thus we only consider this trip over long weekends. Visiting us is a similar effort for my siblings and so I rarely see them anymore. (don't get me started on visiting my in-laws who are over 1000 miles away - suffice to say we need a full week off to consider that)
In short, if you can do so I strongly recommend you live close to your friends and family and not move away. However there are many reasons why someone cannot do this.
7 miles might mean a 7 minute drive, or 90 minutes on poor public transit stuck in traffic. When I lived in my previous place, someone 7 miles away would have been a regular daily friend. Now, I would not see someone more than every few months since 7 miles is the equivalent of a 45 minute drive most hours of the day in most directions unless they happen to live right next to rapid transit.
My closest friends here in the city live a 7 minute and 18 minute walk away. I see them about as much as I'd have seen someone living 5-10 miles away from my previous location. The only real difference is the ability to drink while visiting.
I have noticed that if friends move even an hour outside of the city, you are lucky to see them 4x a year.
It's not much different from moving across the country (typically).
Additionally, 20% of a friend group moving away (1 in 5 people) can be enough to breakup what once was a a solid friend group.
Yes, there's other things at play.
But I definitely think this is the major driver.
It's a common trope on here to lament on how the Anglo cultures don't value family ties strongly enough. I'd argue not overly valuing family ties has been a big competitive advantage of the Anglo cultures for centuries, eg. moving for opportunity (improved social mobility), ability to connect with outsiders, couple pairing across cultural/geographical boundaries, prerequisite to a high trust society, etc.
What really needs to happen is we need to figure out ways of facilitating friend formation/maintenance in this brave new world of the internet and atheism. We are going to need some new social technologies to really combat this.
One interesting recent social technology out of china https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities...
That line of reasoning is just plain sad. It boils down to "everyone might be miserable, but someone else is getting rich so it's good."
What makes it specially sad is how anglo culture's economic advantage spawns from the outcome of WW2, not this misplaced sense of sacrifice.
Quite a stretch to jump to "everyone might be miserable". Immigration from Latin American and other non-anglo countries is on a scale where it shapes American and British domestic politics, difficult to conclude that those immigrants are searching for the misery of anglo cultures that they can't find at home.
I think you're trying too hard to muddy the waters by creating a definition for "anglo" that does not match reality or any use of the term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Americans
Even within "European Americans", nearly half has an ethnic origin that is classified as German, not English.
Another important aspect is immigration and naturalization. The bulk of high-skilled R&D specialists who turned the US into the technological powerhouse that it is aren't exactly Mayflower descendants. It's immigrants and first- and second-generation. So it's very hard to argue about "Anglo" thins with the extreme reliance on immigration and descendent of immigrants to play the roles that made all this progress possible.
- German and other NW European cultures share the family atomization characteristic of Anglo-Americans
- Anglo as a term stems from England. England is named for the Angles, a Scandinavian/Germanic tribe that invaded Britain a long time ago. The term Anglo-American reflects the seminal English influence on American culture.
- The English and their descendant culture, America, basically invented the modern economic world and it predates WWII by a long time.
The idea that WWII is why America is on top is a-historical.
How so?
I'm actually here to point out that the U.S. had the world's largest GDP as early as 1890, or as late as 1913, depending on your source of data and how it's estimated. So, WWII isn't the origin of that. We can now argue about whether GDP is a good indicator, but before doing that I'd ask for a better one (with historical data) to be suggested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of_t...
Aren't Scandinavian people statistically the happiest? That's not anglo culture.
Different cultures also define happiness differently. For the scandanvians, happiness stems from contentment and balance, American society tends to link it to consumerism and material success.
It was a huge country with lots of natural resources like oil, gold, coal, etc.
I wonder how in your opinion atheism enters in the picture? My first guess (of your reference) is that certain religions frighten people into remaining in a marriage they would otherwise not be in. My second guess is that religion fills a social glue role by virtue of getting people together to worship or do other community things.
In my own opinion, part of the problem is that we are not atheist enough, and we still believe in the god-mandated union of a man and a woman, properly enclosed by walls, to bring forth children, as the only way worth living. Yes, there are pockets of resistance to the idea, but too little and too late. By far and large all parents out there are pressing their children to marry and have kids, so that there are grandchildren to fill those golden years. And there is mass media of course, which by far and large does the same. But I suspect that, left to their own devices, a lot of young people may choose to stick to their childhood friends of their same sex or otherwise, and employ one of the myriad ways humans can achieve sexual fulfillment. And since I'm on the topic, our species had sex for bonding long before it had religion, language, and the Internet. It's a pity that after the agricultural revolution and the newly found greed for land, God declared that technology suitable only for establishing property rights and for growing the military might of the tribe.
Which seems to benefit everyone long-term, though (on average/societal scale anyway). I mean what alternatives are you suggesting?
Communes? State run child breeding and education facilities?
If your issue is with monogamy, well that has proven to be the most stable system and seemingly facilitated most of human progress (at least in the more successful societies).
> a lot of young people may choose to stick
You do have a point, it's certainly not necessarily optimal from the individual perspective. Problem is that most alternatives might not be sustainable over several generations so they just die out.
Probably not exactly what you're thinking about but e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers
Wasn't commenting on family formation etc.
I'm Japanese, we (Japan) consider ourselves Non-Religious when we choose to celebrate newborn life at Shinto Shrines, weddings at Christian Churches, and funerals and graves at Buddhist Temples with no dogmatic attachment to any of them as an institution as we go through the motions in life.
There's a healthy enjoyment of Christmas involving cake and Kentucky Fried Chicken in there, too.
Thusly, I always find it interesting/amusing that Atheism is usually positioned as the anti-religion in the West when really it isn't.
More than playing with words, not believing in god may be one of three things: irrelevant, a disadvantage, or a door to a better world. It is irrelevant if you observe the rites and traditions of your society anyway, e.g. if you celebrate newborn life at Shinto Shrines, and weddings and Christian Churches, and Christmas, and if your passing through this world does not intend to play with those "immutables". It's a disadvantage if you find yourself in an ostracized minority or simply disconnected from your neighbors. But it may also be a door to a better world if you yourself or your neighbor are gay, or if you yourself and your neighbor are medical researchers trying to understand why people age, or if you yourself and your neighbor are fighting for the rights of women in some dark corner of the world.
An atheist may write books where gods, angels and demons play with humans, and find it amusing and delight others with it. Or they may enter a church and find it pretty and feel empathy for the pain that move people to worship in such places. An atheist may come to terms with their irreverent faith on that pain not having to be an eternal part of the world, and may try to do something to change it.
To me agnosticism would be more the absence of religion, because the absence of religion doesn't imply any particular opinion on the existence or not of a God. One can believe there might be a God without embracing any religion.
So it is pointless to speak of whether you are “religious”. It makes more sense to ask how you are religious. It is far more interesting to discuss the merits of your religion or other religions than to go around pretending you don’t have one.
The fact that we are open to changing our mind if theoretically presented with strong evidence does not make us agnostic.
You’d probably also accept that sun is made of cheese if presented strong enough evidence but don’t call yourself agnostic about the topic given your current knowledge.
It is not a mere lack of belief, as agnostics can be said to lack belief in God as well. People who are simply ignorant of God also lack a proper belief in God, but this is not atheism, only ignorance. They simply have not come to terms with the subject and therefore have no position on the matter. An atheist does, however unsophisticated it may be.
This view that atheism is simply a lack of belief in God is common among the intellectually challenged New Atheist crowd and would have been ridiculous to the much more intellectually substantive atheists of old, like Neitzsche (who, btw, while an atheist, found it a horrifying thing; the other classic atheists could be described as world-weary rather than insipid, parochial, middle class triumphant).
That aside, "atheism" can obviously mean both things—with regard to a belief or the endorsement of an "existence" proposition. In the case of atheism/theism, the belief part plays a substantial role—it distinguishes between B(~p) and ~B(p), the strong and weak positions, respectively.
There are other ways besides ignorance or agnosticism to arrive at ~B. For example, if my view is that ontological claims can't be propositions, then obviously I can't have beliefs about them one way or another. Or I could reject all supernatural claims out of hand. Why would you insist that one take a firm position on whether "God" specifically "exists" or not? Isn't atheism just a consequence of these views?
To put it plainly, logical consequences of other views can make one an atheist just as much as rejecting p outright. One needn't explicitly endorse or reject every mystical metaphysical claim out there. That would be a bit silly, just as it's a bit silly that we've inherited a special word for "atheism" in the first place.
Unfortunately atheism has the side effect of weakening the social constructs that organized religion brings. Not being a religion itself, it does not prescribe any replacement rituals.
The Japanese stance you describe would better be described as agnosticism, the belief that God's existence doesn't matter. This allows to mix and match existing rituals and beliefs into a coherent whole and puts the individual back into the driving position. It's a very sane way of handling fragmentation of belief and what I believe more people should be doing.
The mix-and-match approach you’re describing is seems more closely related to religious syncretism.
There is the I don't believe in God and I'm not interested in anything more. However there are a lot of vocal Atheists who have turned it into a religion with practices, rituals and doctrines around proving there is no God and thus I elevate that to a religion.
You can choose where you want to be.
Atheists simply don't believe in any gods. Lowercase "gods", it's not exclusive to the Christian God, which a specific god we also don't believe exists.
Please provide evidence to substantiate this claim.
Maybe that isn't you, but it exists.
A religion without gods can exist, and trying to prove God does not exist can be a hobby, but Atheism does not mean either of those concepts.
First, “religion” is not an especially good word in practice, as what people call “religion” is highly varied, enough so that the set of assertions that hold for all of them is exceedingly small and increasingly banal such that it ultimately becomes synonymous with worldview. The vague feeling of what religion is in most people’s minds is highly informed by caricature and parochial experience that is then overgeneralized.
But in the specific case of Catholicism, superstition is, in fact, recognized as sinful precisely because it is irrational (and thus opposed to human nature and the human good) and often rooted in a desire to control what is not in scope for human control or ought not be within the scope of the desire to control. Think “spells” that are meant to control others or palm reading meant to tell you your future or rituals that are supposed to alter your luck like throwing salt over your shoulder or believing that black cats bring bad luck. All these are regarded as irrational in the sense that they have no rational justification, no causal efficacy, or trade in bogus notions, but also conspicuously evil when they entail the desire to objectify and manipulate other people. (These, in turn, are said to predispose their practitioners to malicious influence, as ill will and irrationality are weaknesses that predispose a person to that.) Faith, properly understood, is not the nonsense the popular culture or Hallmark movies tell us it is (i.e., wishful thinking), only either a rationally justified trust or reason supplemented by some kind of divine act. The divinity of Jesus is an article of faith, but the existence of God is not, as it can be know by unaided reason. In any case, the point here is that genuine faith is not a matter of superstition, even if in practice superstitious people often live out a superficial ersatz of faith.
Now, if there is anything that is magic-adjacent in terms of intent and the desire for control, it is the Baconian view of science, not something like Catholicism. Modern science grows out of the Catholic tradition as a sustained enterprise in the sense that Catholicism takes the nature of man to be essentially “rational animal”, and because God (vis—a-vis the Second Person of the Trinity) is seen as essentially Rationality as such (Logos) and the world the fundamentally and fully intelligible creation ex nihilo of God. Baconian science, however, places less emphasis on knowing and greater emphasis on power.
This definition of atheism is non-standard, and dilutes the meaning of "religion".
Let it be noted that almost all atheists will disagree with you that it is a religion. Not all of them, of course, because atheism isn't an organized movement with a doctrine which states what is and isn't "true" atheism.
It's not a religion, though, by any reasonable definition of the term.
That would be better stated as "no belief in gods". The vast majority of atheists in non religious societies aren't spending much time thinking about how there are no gods, or reading up on how they should believe there are gods. They just aren't thinking about it at all, it isn't something they work at.
To steal a quote: "not going skiing isn't a hobby".
For example, there's a 0.5 mile street in the town I grew up in that has 13 churches. This was an area settled by people from around the world, and the churches enabled them to have an immediate extended family when they showed up.
Sure, the church has problems, as does religion. All that's being said is that church is the last great, high trust, free, "third space" in America. The fact that it houses a religion is related but not central to that fact.
Though it's better than what used to happen - which was lots of kids, and high infant mortality, plus poverty driving kids to find jobs in cities, where bad living conditions and factory work awaited them. (And in the 20th century company towns around mines and factories.)
People growing up, flying out of the family nest, and finding friends was a normal part of late teenage years. What's new on top of that is more people are trying to do it again in their 20s after higher education, and again after settling down to have kids, and ...
The good news is that we have the social technology of ... affordable safe high density cities, with parks and high-rises (plus the obligatory blackjack and hookers too!) ... where people can be next to their new and old friends at the same time ... oh my!
Also https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-myth-of-the-loneliness...
Actually, no. It is a very recent phenomenon, and never experienced before at this scale in the history of mankind.
Even at the current scale, this is what the data shows:
> Nearly six in 10 young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up, and eight in 10 live within 100 miles, according to a new study by researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau and Harvard University.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/07/theres-no-pla...
About 4 million people moved from rural areas to a town in the 19th century in the UK.
Many people moved to "the new world", etc.
Of course most moves were short (simply "one level up" on the density ladder).
"""
The working-class intercounty migrant was young, literate and skilled; the median distance travelled was 59 miles. Regional migration pathways are described. Rural workers moved more frequently than urban workers, but urban workers travelled a greater median distance than their rural counterparts
"""
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03057...
""" ... only 29% of heads of households in 1871 had been born in Manchester and 12% originated from surrounding counties, 32% were long-distance mainland migrants, coming from as far afield as Scotland and East Anglia. """
https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/migration-cities/0/...
So if 80% are staying withing a 100 miles, 20% moving more is not that far from the 32% in the 19th century.
My gut feel is that having to maintain close family ties and living with parents until adulthood are an adaption to poverty, poor social mobility, and low trust society. People will rationalize it but given opportunity they'll act in the exact same way as the rest of us (just look at urbanization in China).
Thanks for the article, wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the loneliness epidemic is a statistical artifact of bad data.
However I think there's plenty of evidence that migration and intermingling between tribes occurred frequently. If only as social practices to prevent inbreeding. Probably a bunch of bride kidnapping sadly but also young males leaving to seek opportunity isn't an exclusively modern phenomenon.
True but as far as we can tell it was usually (if not entirely exclusively) done through the same social networks that existed locally [unless you were leaving to murder/rape/rob people]. Unless they really, really had to you only moved to another city/location because you had a cousin, uncle etc. or someone else there you had some ties with. Outside of organizations like the church or the army (and even then) a complete outsider was at an extreme disadvantage (relative to today).
Genetic diversity requires someone leave their family and join a different one. How that happened varied but nearly every culture recognized siblings having children together resulted in deformed kids and thus developed a culture to prevent that. Every culture includes other animals.
It is like literally what they did - more than ever after and before.
What happened during the last century is ... complicated. For one thing religion was never really that organized in the US. (Maybe except in Utah. But that's also relatively new.)
I think simply WWII, and the post-WWII economic boom (plus the GI bill), plus then the heating up Cold War slowly but surely transformed society. For the new generations the various Christian belief systems offered by churches were simply not a real option.
People got an appetite for different answers whether be that science or pseudoscience based. Cults and other ideology-based groups filled some of the vacuum. (And of course the counterculture eventually and then after Vietnam and the race riots came the backlash. The Southern Strategy, which platformed evangelicals, but as a political group, not as organized religion. Basically emptying out the spiritual part, etc. And of course it still works.)
No such cities exist in the USA
They said safe my guy
That anyone chooses to live like that baffles me.
I grew up in a Midwestern shithole.
My older friends leaving, and knowing I was was going to leave too, didn't help.
In the USA and Europe I trust none of that. I've had cars broken into 5 times, bikes stolen 5 times, car stolen once. Reports of people stealing packages. I know I can't trust people at a coffee shop not to steal my laptop while I go to the restroom. Friend have had wallets stolen stopping to take a picture. etc.....
This means I trust no one in the USA or Europe. So to me, the USA an Europe are low trust societies.
Which is to say I find the US is a high trust society where I live. I know there are other places where things are much worse.
It's been sad to watch it slowly get worse every year.
It goes for all things, not just petty/street crime though. Everything from business owners not prioritizing doing good work and building local reputation, employees slacking off as much as possible, investors demanding extreme profits at the expense of everyone else, corporations shipping out entire towns worth of industry to foreign countries, on down to actual crime itself.
It certainly wasn't all roses in the past - but it's a marked change from even my youth. Civic engagement is easy for anyone to see, and that would also be such a symptom.
One wonders how much of the high trust was a product of the immense prosperity unlocked by industrialization, some ameliorating reforms during the Progressive Era that mitigated the excesses of the Gilded Era, the New Deal, and postwar victory.
You'd think companies would value not killing their customers and market forces would take care of the problem, but, empirically, that's not how it has turned out. Customers are too far from the source; the incentives for fucking off are too high, and too frequently the food processors get away with it. Big-L Libertarianism is not compatible with safe food and medication.
They literally didn’t trust people to drink from the same water fountain
FWIW the only Anglo country left in the EU is Ireland.
So, it seems like their methodology doesn't actually match reality and is why I don't trust their results.
I might leave my laptop on a table while I use a public restroom in China, but I sure as hell trust a business partner far less than I would one in the US on average.
Cultures differ greatly in how trust is assigned and expectations. There are areas in Eastern Europe I would walk through a dark alley at 3am in the 'bad' part of town and not think twice about it. But I sure wouldn't trust their police force to not be corrupt and expect a bribe if they hassled me. The reverse holding true in a major city in the US.
What I observed was a deference to authority. Harsh government punishment for anti-social behavior is accepted and seen as the "role" of the government. While people in Anglo countries might protest against unfair government action, in Asian countries it's much more rare. People in Singapore grumble about how the government might punish behavior, but they keep those conversation to their family and close friends.
In terms of trust or concern, it doesn't extend much beyond the immediate family unit in Asia. I would say respect or concern for strangers is higher in Western countries Many people in Asia are happy to rip off others in Asia (if they think they can get away with it), but even the deadbeat cousin gets money from the family because "it's the right thing to do".
Very hard thing to measure.
But it’s more than a single generation thing. If you live for 18 years in a family that has only recently put down roots in a new place, you won’t have family around, unlikely to have as many family friends around, etc. Community will likely be sparse and colder.
You essentially get a generational social debt put onto kids, over and over. It appears that cohesion is lost, pro-social behaviour decreases, focus on less social activity increases, and so on.
Are there problems, of course, like all societies. But it's easy and it works.
Sorta but not really. Lots of people just fake it for the community aspects.
Reminds me of all these older Americans talking about how "people don't want kids these days" when polling shows younger folks want just as many kids as their own parents but can't afford them.
If you'd wish to make that claim then you'd be awfully wrong.
To start off, you'd be basing your personal opinion on what would most charitably be described as survivorship bias. I mean, try to think about it. The observable sample you're trying to generalize is a tiny subset of a whole population which is the output of a social process subjected to a long sequence of socioeconomical filters.
It would make as much sense as to claim that the average American is excellent at American football by using NFL teams as your sample of the US population.
The immense majority of Latin American don’t live in the US neither migrate there.
You’re proving my point exactly: those characterizations, especially in the context of Latin American culture as a foil, reveal their own biases. Both are based on anecdotes and vibes, not reality. To me, it's all narcissism of minor differences. I find the need to paint whole cultures with such a broad brush weird, especially based on my experience with people from around the world: most people aren't so different.
I think most are thinking about a higher proportion of adults living at the same household as their parents in some countries when they say that. However in recent year the proportion in the US got a lot closer to Latin American countries. Then again it probably significantly varies by race, ethnic background etc. which doesn't invalidate the anecdotal evidence people might have.
> cultures with such a broad brush weird, especially
US is very heterogeneous but it works reasonably well in many other places besides a handful of outliers.
True. Looking back you hadn't really made any coherent enough arguments in your comments that could be agreed or disagreed with.
I am from Uruguay though, which is the best Latin American country, so YMMV, if I was from Venezuela I'd move to the US 100%.
With that in mind, if Latin America had safety, I suspect at least half of the immigrants wouldn't leave, especially the ones who are able to hold a middle class job.
Most of us would live in a lower standard of life if it allowed to stay close to friends and family. But not being able to walk down the street bears a heavy weight on our anxieties.
Moving in response to this reality is not an American values problems. I find the instinct to blame Americans for their discontent while framing others in the same situation as victims quite odd.
Latin American tends to be unsafe (physically), but the money probably plays a bigger motivating factor. Remittances and ‘doing it for the family back home’ are common themes.
Depending on which country and which city, Latin American cities are not more dangerous than risky US cities. Many of our cities are reasonably safe. There are burglaries, muggings and robbery like in most big cities all over the world -- no more, and no less.
There are some "trouble" hot spots that are particularly dangerous, of course. The same can be said of the US.
There are trouble hotspots (and countries) just as there are trouble hotspots in the US.
It's not true that Latin America as a whole is "unsafe". It's not Ciudad Juárez everywhere. I live in Buenos Aires and there's crime comparable to any big city (with better and worse periods, of course).
Southern South America isn’t bad, but also doesn’t have many people in it.
it isn't just that they can't afford them, it's that the standards for "good parenting" have increased. Simultaneously, both partners have less time for raising kids because of economic pressure
But the state doesn't subsidize childcare or offer universal pre-K, so the only real solution is to keep importing people from more "trad" cultures until the whole thing blows up
So kids usually have a a choice - either stay where they grew up, and live with reduced economic opportunities (actually very common, but those folks aren’t usually posting all over the Internet about it).
Or move to where the economic opportunity is good, but then be isolated from prior friends and family. Those people talk a lot more, and tend to stick out. That is also more expensive, so those folks tend to have more economic backing and/or stronger ‘resumes’ which correlates to more education, getting more opportunity, etc.
If folks from the second group have issues and need to retreat to a more comfortable economic situation, they’ll also return to where they tended to grow up, usually.
One of those two groups is more often to be called ‘losers’. Which one do you think it is?
Oh, did I say the US? This is actually many countries, minus ease of moving around.
That's the problem. Due to car culture and zoning policies etc.
Root cause is moving for work IMO.
There’s a parallel to sending your kids off to war. Get them away from their sense of stability, to a place where it’s too expensive to live, for years at a time, to fight for the United States’ GDP.
It’s not just the young adults who are affected. In some cases their family members grieve the separation. And yet it seems like the only way to get ahead for many.
The move in my case sent me deep into a depression. It turned out that my new employer had lied to me, and that the signing bonus I had spent to move would need to be paid back, so I couldn’t just quit. While dealing with that stressful environment, without my support network, I ended up developing Crohn’s disease, and you could in some sense say that I lost my 20s over it. I’ll never fully recover from the career damage, lost ambitions, health impact, or time missed with family members who have since passed away.
Even if this is just a “tiny fraction” of workers, allowing them the liberty to easily pursue their career while also maintaining close relations with their family would be good, not merely something to write off as negligible. Every human life matters.
I recently spent a lot of time in some more rural parts of the US. There is rapidly growing resentment over this topic. It came up nearly daily in casual conversation/overheard at bars/etc.
It might be good for 5-10% of the population, but at what cost to social cohesion? These were certainly not CEO type of folks, and they were not terminally on-line or overtly political. Just quite average people across the age and industry spectrum.
Now add in those knowledge workers typically making far more money than the prevailing local wages and it gets even worse as they bid up housing.
This is something I think about a lot. It's easy to dismiss as many here do with "stop crying, life isn't fair" - but that's not a very satisfying answer. It's about as satisfying and corrosive to society as telling coal miners to "learn to code".
My family was heartbroken over the years that I lived away from them. At times, they wondered what they might have done wrong to cause me to leave them. Moving away from my roots, to pursue my only job offer after undergrad, was the opposite of social cohesion. Many of my peers from high school——the size of my graduating class was 69——do not make anywhere near my income, and none of them feel any resentment towards me about it, just like they don’t resent the farmers who own hundreds of acres of farmland or the classmates who went to medical school or got their JD. If anything, we feel mutual pride for what one another has accomplished. I feel that your sampling method didn’t pick up on something really crucial about small, rural communities, where people tend to grow up together and to know one another for life, in continuation of relationships among families which have endured for generations.
Rural areas will do just fine if people like myself choose to live modestly, in a county that doesn’t even have the convenience of a grocery store, instead of in one of the most expensive places on earth.
I’m not talking about people who previously had roots that came back home as a wayward son. Those people, including me, will get a pass as we are one of the good ones. Especially (and maybe only) so because we’ve kept up relations and close ties over the interceding years and we are currently few and far between.
However, I’m fairly confident in my sampling bias on this one. I am close enough to people where they are willing to talk freely and the tenor is not great. Perhaps I simply have a bubble of especially negative folks, and maybe your area of the country is different. There was already a large current of resentment towards the white collar professionals prior to covid and I can only say that it’s accelerated quite a bit since. I only recently was able to spend considerable time around places like where I grew up.
We are not generally a single generation away from “moving away from the farm” at this point in the country. Many are generations removed. And it doesn’t need to be absolutely middle of nowhere either on this one. If you’re a curiosity for the area you typically won’t have an issue. It’s when you hit a critical mass of “haves” vs the “have nots” that the problems spring up. And many folks resent the people who don’t have to “work for a living” sitting at home all day. It’s about a shared experience and “in this together” feeling that most knowledge workers will simply not endenger.
Why not put it to a vote at the community level, out of respect for community autonomy, economic freedom, and democratic values? I can tell you that the people who are close enough to their children for them to want to stay around would never say no to a job opportunity that lets them do just that without sacrificing their career to do so. To boot, these communities generally have been home to at least some remote workers for decades already, but much of tech has fallen ill to narcissism in believing that it is somehow too special / important to also provide such an opportunity.
The majority of people who choose to live in their hometown, over a flashier place that they could also afford, are doing it out of love for their community, not out of some anti-social tendency to take advantage of it as you suggest. Perhaps some decision makers, somewhere, got where they are through a self-selection bias, and are projecting their own psychological quirks onto others.
There are a great many people whose families have roughly stayed put for generations. Your reasoning / dismissiveness / lack of care for these people shows a lack of insight or a tendency to marginalize the concerns of people from rural America.
It couldn't solve everything, that doesn't mean it can't solve anything.
My experience in rural areas (northern canada) has been the opposite of yours.
Locals welcome remote workers because the alternative is bidding up housing over vacation homes that sit empty.
Remote workers give back to the community through civic engagement and injecting their income into it year round. Anyone not in that mindset of integrating with the community typically doesn't stay past their first winter.
Locals are also the ones to decide if/when/where they advertise real estate to outsiders. Locals always get first dibs via word of mouth so there isn't as much resentment.
But maybe that is the difference between rural communities and remote communities?
I'm living this now. We moved back to have kids near friends and family after college. The judgment I get from people for being a towny is ASTOUNDING. I have to justify the reason for being here and talk about how I've lived in other places for a few years for people to take me seriously. It's ridiculous.
Why shouldn't I bring my experience back to fix the problems in this area? What's the problem with that?
The older I get, the more I regret moving away from my family and friends in New Jersey. I'm only 3 hours away so still see them about once a month, but I'm very envious of my friends that stayed in our home town and get to see each other every weekend and their children get to spend daily time with their grandparents.
Whenever we consider moving back though, housing prices are always one of the biggest deterrents.
Often, with these kinds of places, they aren't a place your family has lived for generations, and nor are they a place you have the opportunity to form any good connections in; rather, they're somewhere your parents had to move to when they lost their jobs/went bankrupt/etc, and so could no longer afford to live anywhere with higher land values.
Everyone living in these places encourages anyone who has any potential at all, to get out as soon as they can.
But avoiding police is essential for people like me who even have slightly more melanin in their skin than the usual amount. There are certain stores I learn not to use, and I have to learn the locals too avoid in each one I live. The number of times that I'm treated well but that I'm somehow unique in my imagined racial group is unusually high.
And I want to be clear, this isn't just in "white" communities in the Midwest, but other cultures/"races" too. I don't fit in with any because I fall into the mythical "mixed race" category.
This is truly a sad social construct that I wish would die already, but yes, it's often part of the cultural nature of such places. Holding these beliefs often leads to people holding the view that their problems are caused by some external force that they can never overcome, and they end up trapped in places with low economic opportunity.
So yes, racist. And I'm not limiting this to one race or culture. It's sadly a common part of the places where I most want to live and will never fit in.
What do you mean by this? Are you treated well or not?
I took my (Asian) partner back with me to visit the small town I grew up in, and I could not believe some of the shit coming out of people's mouths when they saw her. Literally 1 in 5 people she talked to while we were there would do some sort of "funny" voice or ask her some real stupid shit; and 1 in 20 people we passed while walking around in the downtown area would shout slurs at her from across the street.
And that's with me there walking with her—I can't even imagine what they'd be doing if she was there alone.
I find it impossible to believe that people are literally “yelling slurs” to anyone in street unprovoked. I look like a 9/11 hijacker and nobody has ever done that to me even walking around bumblefuck south Georgia.
> Park next to someone? They yell, "This ain't China, don't park so close." Walk home from school? Students yell ching chong at me. Shit is messed.
Is this “racism” or bad manners/people trying to get a rise out of you? Did that guy yell at you because you were Asian, or would he have yelled at you if you were white—just with a different comment? Same for the kids in school—if you were different in another way (fat, skinny, etc) would they have shouted that at you instead?
Do you think you’ve ever been materially prejudiced because you were Asian rather than white?
this is just an anecdote, and you don't have to believe what i say. but i think racism (against asians) is very real and many people are affected by it every day.
What I find odd is the impact of this negative interaction in a parking lot. Do you think the guy wouldn’t have yelled at you had you been white? If not, what’s the real difference between “this isn’t China” and “are you blind?”
your point is racism towards asians does not exist, because these random assholes are being assholes toward random targets and they would basically act the same way to other white people. i disagree. i believe what the grandparent comment described about their partner's experience in rural town america is more or less true. you are free to think they are a liar or an outlier. but when people you have never interacted with call you a chinese ching chong on the street when you're just walking home, you have to admit there is some racial element to their abuse. would they have yelled anything at me if i were just another white dude in their predominantly white neighborhood? somehow i highly doubt that.
no, i don't think these people go about their lives consciously trying to be especially mean to asian people. most of them have probably just internalized certain biases against asians. for the sake of convenience, i and many others have decided to categorize such patterns of behavior as racism.
again, you are free to believe that racism is not real. if you are squarely within that camp, i doubt anything i say will change your mind.
Did you park too close?
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
Amusingly for this discussion, I started reading 'rayiner about a decade ago (long before this account) specifically because he seemed intelligent but I disagreed with him about issues involving race and the South! Being accused of being 'rayiner is an amazing twist to the story.
If you're the sort of person who would never expect to get randomly fucked with on the street, then you shouldn't expect to be the target of voiced bigotry, either.
> Did that guy yell at you because you were Asian
Yes, 100% it was because she was Asian.
The small town I grew up in is effectively 100% white (just by coincidence of history); but exists near some major global cities (like the one I live in now) that have a good mix of ethnicities, and especially an increasingly-large percentage of Asian people.
Due to various economic factors, many otherwise-well-to-do people can no longer afford to live in the big cities. This includes many immigrants of other races who originally moved to this country to live in these big cities, and have never visited the rest of the country. These people (including the immigrants) started off just moving to commuter suburbs — but as those shot up in land value as well, people are now increasingly moving to outlying non-cosmopolitan small towns, which do still have lower land values.
And that's shifting the demographics of these small towns.
This wave of demographic shift has not yet reached the town I grew up in.
AFAICT there is a sentiment among people who live there that they don't want "outsiders" — i.e. immigrants / anyone who's not a tenth-generation resident of the country — to move into the town. The sight of such people — especially when those people are "city slickers" doing "tourist" things in the town — enrages them.
So, it's not a prejudice these people have that's specific to any one race of people — but it is a racially-motivated prejudice. It is, essentially, a racial purity mindset — whether the people living there would call it that or not. (I say "racial purity" generally rather than "white supremacist" specifically, because this dynamic exists in provincial small towns in every country that's currently experiencing demographic shift — with the people in those small towns being bigots against any ethnicity other than their own, but especially against whichever ethnicities are increasing in prevalence in the countrie's large cities and beginning to "spill over" into small towns.)
The only time a white American ever said anything negative to me was a middle school bully, and I called him a pig-nosed pink pig in response. Both of us were just looking to get a rise out of the other, so in my estimation that’s not “racism.”
The comments by the Arabs, by contrast, is based on a racial ideology. Though I don’t get worked up about it because who cares about a random interaction at the mall? The only thing I’ve ever experienced that I’d call material racism is the social exclusion by Indian people. Because that arises in professional or workplace contexts.
> Everyone living in these places encourages anyone who has any potential at all, to get out as soon as they can.
doesn't apply. People who think that a McMansion full of TVs and a $65,000 pickup truck are aspirational spend time trying to convince hapless recent grads to join them when said kids would be better served moving someplace where people 1) have more than one type of job and 2) spend their free time doing something other than driving drunk and sleeping with each others' spouses.
For every bucolic town full of hardworking people with real jobs there's a Nowheresville riddled with Java Developers and middle managers building Struts applications for a Fortune 500 company while patting themselves on the back for having a six-figure job they can't get fired from. The performative working-class attitude that these people still have despite having never done an honest day's work is even worse but I digress...
Now we have friends from foreign places that are not so foreign anymore! Friends from all around the world. : )
I consider ourselves lucky.
Picking up and moving across the country is pretty rare in America as well. More common than Latin America, but still not that common.
That said, I would say the biggest contributor to my economic success is my mobility. But it is a trade off, it certainly has an impact on the family and social unit.
A lot of the conversation around modern American youth feeling isolated, lacking socialization and not building strong relationships seems that stem from this drive.
Another thing that’s really weird and related is another recurring theme in the American ethos: the cultural shame that comes with living “at home” or staying in the same small town for your whole life. Somehow they made it so living close to your family and friends for your 20s-30s and maybe forever means you’re a “loser”.