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Kinda want to think out loud about resiliency-aware long-term personal migration planning inspired by this shitshow example of not doing it all, in a place where people should have been doing it yesterday.
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Excellent and sobering story about the aftermath of the Paradise fire and the life of ‘fire nomads’ in the shadow of the PG&E settlement. Multiply this picture 100x everywhere for general climate change impact latimes.com/california/sto
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I see many single people in their 20s/30s process this question out loud in endearingly hopeful, idealistic, wishful ways, with what has an *appearance* of modest aspirations relative to world-is-oyster neoliberal careerist yuppies of yore but is actually radically more ambitious
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As in, a single person dreaming of moving to a low-cost geography with single friends/likely partners and then simultaneously growing a community and family… sounds less ambitious than the yuppie script right? It’s almost hippie drop-out in apparent humility and modesty.
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The yuppie script *sounds* more ambitious: get shiny degree, move to a happening, costly, urban core, try to make it in a competitive careerist world, “win” enough to buy a neourban or new-suburban home with appreciating value, raise kids in nice school district.
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But it’s only financially more ambitious. The only thing you have to get right is make enough money and qualify for a mortgage. It’s actually the modest younger millennial/older zoomer script that’s 10x more ambitious, even though on paper it looks more achievable financially.
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This is vastly harder than just making money (yuppie script) or just staying near actual extended family (trad script)!! We need a name for these pseudo-trad, commune-aspiring young singles. Famtribers? The famtriber lifestyle design problem is 10x harder than trad or yuppie.
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I can barely process the lifestyle preferences of *two* people (me and wife) into coherent plans… we’re crashed-and-burned former yuppies now middle-aging into anthropocene 🤣 Actual trads like my extended family in India can barely keep their long-history situations stable.
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And famtribers want to solve an n-body version of the problem, with less money, by age 32.5, imagining it’s *easier*? Good luck with that 🤣
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Precisely this. Wow. The only reason 1% of you taking a swing at this might make it work is because you have no clue how hard it is and get lucky. And your solution won’t generalize into a pattern others can emulate. Your Trump card (crypto, startup funding) won’t generalize.
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Replying to @vgr
Literally just posted this to my IG. 35yo with 2 little kids in Seattle. I feel this HARD.
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I mean I’d love to be able to pull that off. After all I joke about a But I have no illusions how hard it is. 23 years/22 apartments/8 cities have made me calibrated on how hard it is to find your place in the world. Money is the *easiest* way to solve it.
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But the famtribers get one thing right. The “social” variable is top of the list. Everything else rests on it. They just get the controllability of it wildly wrong. Any place you can fully control the social dimension is going to be unlivable. Might as well be on Mars.
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Top 5 factors I hope I’ll be able to hit within the next few moves/years (hitting this in 1 move seems unlikely) 1. Local culture we can tolerate 2. Quality healthcare 2. Affordable 3. Climate resilience 4. Decent density and proximity to airports/roads
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Here’s what they don’t get: any simpatico fictive-kin grouping you love is going to be too small to sustain in anything other than Mars-base-cult mode. Which means expensive supply chains to rest of humanity. A minimum viable community today is a few tens of thousands not 150.
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Like… you’ll grow older and need complex healthcare sooner than you think. Even if you live some radical alt-health lifestyle doing your own research and hating on CDC, FDA and irreproducible papers… yeah, you’re not going to DIY a better healthcare system.
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For all its corruption, establishment healthcare knows more about health than you ever will. And 1% of those who try might do better with a crackpot DIY regimen might win. 9% might manage with limited dependency. But 90% of us will end up in orbit around a hospital system by 70.
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And to be clear, I don’t buy the bullshit dark-conspiratorial idea that most poor health is manufactured system dependency and the effect of diseases of modernity etc. Yes those play a role but much smaller than you imagine in revolutionary fever dreams.
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“The system is incentivized to keep you sick” etc makes for good dorm-room sessions, but the healthcare system is mostly something you’ll end up trusting, push come to shove. You’ll yell at hapless doctors about MRIs and insurance and different prescriptions like the rest of us.
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But okay, back to main topic. Landing in a place where you can “settle down” the way my parents are disappointed I still haven’t… isn’t “playing house” with a few friends. It’s a 30-50 year problem, 90% of which is things you can’t control. And it’s gotten way harder.
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Exactly. And at 46, neither wife, nor I have really managed to form stable *local* friendships anywhere we’ve lived in a decade. The problem that’s so easy in college and in a long-term paycheck job is basically impossible for an increasing fraction of us.
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Replying to @vgr
Step 1: get friends
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“Settling down” is in fact how most people *make* friends in older easier scripts that are now out of reach. You’d hate 90% your neighbors but at least you’d know them and like the other 10%. It’s not an input, it’s an output.
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While some do ideologically want a divorce from the healthcare system, it’s more of a practical consequence. Anywhere you can afford to build an ab initio community will likely be far from good healthcare which tends to be in metros. It’s DIY or sketchy local healthcare.
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Replying to @vgr
I’m not sure I understand why living with people in a social commune / fictive kin type situation automatically means you’re anti FDA? The screenshot you linked doesn’t aspire to that does it?
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People who haven’t managed or been primary caregiver for people with significant healthcare needs don’t realize how far you increasingly need to travel these days to access it. The more miracles modern medicine can do, the more it can only do them in major metros areas.
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But okay. Pause here. I’m frankly not interested in the famtribers version of the Early Anthropocene Migration and Settling Problem: EAMASP. I’m married and 46, not single and 30. I just analyzed it to understand the current environment for everybody, whether 15, 30, 45, or 60.
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To set up the rest of the thread, while social dimension is still #1, I’m solving for general background cultural tolerability, where I can get along with locals enough to not be in constant conflict. Having friends nearby and knowing your neighbors is a 20th century luxury.
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When you solve for hard-edged variables — healthcare, decades-out climate resiliency, affordability — gonna have to give up some social stuff. I don’t really care if I have good friends nearby. That ship sailed in 1997. I’ve made friends with 1 neighbor in 18 post-univ-years
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And he’s been even more of a rootless nomad than me… a few years older, single, and currently bumming around somewhere in Eastern Europe… having logged probably 15 cities to my 8 😂 (this is who was my neighbor 2004-06 in Ithaca when I was a postdoc)
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Yeah. People think they’re far more convergent than they are. When you add free variables, divergence reasserts itself. It’s like a spatial Jevon’s paradox. Even the most friendly and extroverted of you don’t like your friends as much as you think. Hell is other people etc.
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Replying to @kneelingbus @vgr and @basicmansion
also $$ makes it harder because everyone has more options
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Okay, having set aside the utopian dreams of the young ‘uns in a disagree-but-commit way (as in, I think their premises and reasoning are bonkers, but I support their intentions, wish them luck, and hope I’m wrong), let’s pose the selfish question. How should I frame my version?
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My own premises are based on lessons of experience and middle-aged constraints and risk aversion, rather than forward-looking dreams based on bitcoin libertarian dreams or whatever.
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And the only reason my version even needs imagination at all is that I burned the options to do the normal thing 10 years ago. Most of my peers from college are careerist yuppies in suburban McMansions, VP titles, and kids starting to graduate high school. I’m off that script.
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What have I learned so far? First, pay attention to why people *leave* the places/situations you are considering moving to. If you leave, you’ll likely leave for similar reasons, so to maximize chances of sticking the landing instead of bouncing away… see reasons for leaving.
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Second: your movement spreadsheet starts out tall and (more candidate places in rows than constraints in columns) and ends up wide as you age (more constraints than places). Like at 22 I’d have moved anywhere in the world from Mumbai and taken on most immigration challenges.
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Your best chance at solving well is ~32-35, when you have enough experience of enough places to know your preferences, but haven’t gotten set in your ways too much. We *almost* bought in DC when I was ~35 and we were both paychecked and mortgageable (now neither of us is).
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Third, relatedly… most places are illegible to varying degrees. You can’t know if you’ll like it without living there for a bit. But the spectrum is huge. Some places a short visit will tell you 90% of what you need to know. Others, years.
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