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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“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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Great metaphor. I definitely want to be within the Schwarzschild radius of a quality healthcare black hole as we age. Hell, already we fly my 70y-old mother-in-law from Las Vegas to LA for some conditions she needs to manage for which Vegas — a decent-sized city — sucks. twitter.com/hondanhon/stat
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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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Perhaps, but 90% of people I know facing where-to-settle angst land on this wistful dream by crashing out of the *easier* script. They’re not consciously signing up for what they are aware is a 10x harder problem. twitter.com/egocv/status/1
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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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There was a good article about this I can’t find now.
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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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It’s partly a function of size (Ithaca is grokkable in a year, LA is 2-3 years)
Partly your personality. New York is as illegible as LA, but I knew *I* hated it in 5 minutes. Knock on wood, the universe might dump me there yet, and wife has vague unresolved attractions to it.
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Fourth, “general cultural background” is far more important over long time periods than friendships/family. Like gravity is stronger than strong/weak nuclear forces at larger space scales. Even the best family/friends won’t let you tolerate an otherwise inhospitable milieu.
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Unless you’re absolutely forced to (= primary caregiver for someone who can’t leave) you’ll leave friends/family behind, rather than stay in a hostile milieu, 100% of the time. The get-out instinct is unbelievably strong.
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You really can’t be around a mass of people who detest you or don’t share your broad values beyond about 70%. Schelling sorting is real. Which is why for eg, most Trump-heartland, much as I might want to be open to them, is closed off to me because they’d be hostile to me.
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(this is not a wild guess… I have a ton of compelling personal anecdata gathered over 20+ years, from before Trump years, that give me an accurate mental model of life if I tried to live there)
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Fifth: every place you’ve already lived in and not hated will automatically be in your preferred shortlist when considering next move. The great advantage of “going back,” so long as you don’t wait so long the place changes unrecognizably, is you’ve already deep-learned it.
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As your problem gets harder, going back looks sweeter. For eg., for next move, going back to Seattle is probably the third strongest possibility, after west side LA and San Diego. Chicago is looking attractive though neither of us has lived there, but both have experience of it.
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Ok. Will stop here for today. Wanted to think out loud to set up next move-brainstorming cafe session. We’ll likely move again within the year. I like current place but it’s both too expensive long-term and urban blight nearby is getting to be too much.
Big Q: stay in CA or not?
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