[mschuster91]

> Some cross state borders multiple times in their lives. This is what we want to achieve, because it fuels economic growth and removes obstacles to happiness.

On the other hand, people are forced to uproot and discard their entire social support network - family, friends and others - multiple times in their lives. This does not only negatively impact happiness, but also has severe side effects and associated costs!

This can range from not having a place to crash (or a source to borrow money from) when getting priced out of a home or losing your job, but also having to waste money on childcare, family meetings / events being more expensive because people are spread all over the country and similar problems. And for the elderly, they are dumped in care homes with substandard but expensive care instead of being around their families in their final days. Call me old-fashioned but I find this disgusting.

And I didn't even touch the topic if this uprooting of people is detrimental to their mental health, especially for children - I would not be surprised if the rise of depression and other MH disorders can be linked to being constantly on the move in childhood!

The worst net negative for society as a whole is that enforcing mobility creates a massive concentration of people in urban areas (where rents explode and traffic becomes untenable) on one side and "left behind" rural areas on the other side where population erosion only leads to bitterness and erosion of trust in democracy itself, and any investment in infrastructure or life quality becomes prohibitively expensive.

We have seen the culmination of decades of neoliberalism in the rise of nationalist demagogues across democracies worldwide. We as humanity need to take a step back, cool down and ask ourselves if what we are doing is actually positive for society.

[toyg]

Being an EU migrant myself, I know the impact of all this very well. Every day I wake up hoping my parents are still healthy, because caring for them will soon be a massive problem. And still, chances are that sticking around my hometown, as beautiful as it is, would have doomed me to a much worse life - and not because it's been "left behind" in any way, but because I simply don't match the culture in very significant ways.

Obviously nobody should be forced to move. Nobody is "enforcing mobility" in Europe; they did in the past though, when Mussolini literally sold Italian labourers to half the planet and the UK shipped convicts to the colonies. The good ol' times often weren't that good. What we need is to provide all the freedom we can, and let people look for happiness wherever they see fit.

[mschuster91]

> and not because it's been "left behind" in any way, but because I simply don't match the culture in very significant ways.

I'm simply going to assume on a stretch you're either on the LGBT+ spectrum or socially progressive, please forgive me if I'm wrong.

I disagree with you on the "not left behind" part: the "rural flight" aka all young people fleeing to urban areas as soon as they possibly can has made rural areas "left behind" socially, because the ones who stay behind objectively see that the young people are fleeing, but instead of placing the blame on politicians who did jack shit to keep rural areas liveable (e.g. by providing high speed internet and public transport), many of them resort to blaming "the gays" for "corrupting their children" and similar - which in turn is even more incentive for those few youth that remain to flee. It's a vicious circle.

[toyg]

I don't match the stereotype (I just moved from a culture that ruthlessly exploits the honest to one that at least lets them live a tranquil life), but I do agree that phenomena like that do exist.

Something like 40% of my high-school classmates have moved to another city or country, for one reason or another, and the ones who've remained seem to have become somewhat hyper-localistic, almost as a reflex or justification for not doing the same.

I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think forcing me or others to stick around would have made much of a difference beyond generating even more social resentment.