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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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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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