[Yhippa]

I moved from where I grew up. The biggest advantage is access to better career paths and potential with my career. If I get laid off, there are more diverse work options, unlike where I grew up.

The flip side is that being able to have family help out easily when our kid is sick. Also I have friends who stayed back home (the ratio matching this article title pretty closely) and they have barbecues together, can hang out on a random night around a fire pit, watch movies in their backyard, and other fun things. About planting roots and settling down.

I'm really torn about these two ways of going about it. There's something very comforting about setting down roots and having a solid network of friends and family. The flip side is that you're probably leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. The history of success in America seems to lean towards being nomadic.

[siquick]

Depends on your definition of success?

I moved to the other side of the world from where I grew up in my early 30s, and I grew up at the other end of the country from where I was born and lived my early years.

I have a great group of mates I met in my early twenties and still speak with daily on WhatsApp.

As you say they meet up regularly, know each others families well, and they have not left their home area and have been friends since primary school.

They’re all jealous that I have lived an “adventurous and exciting” life and I’m jealous that they have amazingly solid roots.

[dorchadas]

I'm in pretty much this exact situation right now (we actually all left then returned in early/mid 20s after university), and, well, it's still lonely. WhatsApp (or, in our case, Discord) is no substitution for physically being able to meet up. I have friends where I live now, but it's not the same level of depth in the friendship, where we'd just go to each other's houses and shoot the shit for hours about everything and nothing (as we've done since high school) and I feel that is something I didn't realise I wanted and was missing until I moved. It's actually got me seriously reconsidering returning. Gonna be hard leaving after Christmas this year.

[chrisco255]

I feel like with remote work, it's possible to have your cake and eat it, too. Depends on your career, but at least in software, it no longer feels like you have to move to a tech hub to make it, for example.