The average American will move 11.7 times throughout their life. Graduate degrees, job changes, growing families, relationships ending or progressing to the next step – all of these things and more are not only big changes in themselves, but they also often go hand in hand with moving your life across town, the state, the country, or even an ocean. As we enter our late twenties ourselves, we know it won’t be long before many close friends begin to settle down, start families of their own, and inevitably find new homes. While of course exciting, these events can also mean major changes in our lives and relationships as we know them. With so many different (and changing) factors at play, how do we ultimately decide where to call home?

Can I ask you a personal question?

🏡 Home is where the ??? is

In recent decades, millennials have been a generation on the move. One 2015 survey conducted by Rent.com found that roughly half of those aged 18 - 34 were living in a different city than the one they grew up in. Millennials have often been credited with driving the revitalization of American cities, but some researchers have questioned whether this is a reflection of preference or simply of circumstance. Confronted with the bleak professional prospects following the 2008 financial crisis, many millennials had little choice but to stay in cities, where they could find the highest concentration of available jobs at a time when opportunities were far from abundant. Consistent with this perspective, the same Rent.com poll found that the largest driver of millennials moving, coming in at 43% of all those surveyed, was finding a new job.

Though the median distance Americans live from their mothers is a mere 18 miles – surprisingly close – that number gets higher and higher as the education level and income of the child increase and they move further away to find higher-paying jobs in need of their skill sets, often in bigger cities. And this trend is only further amplified for dual-earning couples with both partners earnestly pursuing their careers. As more women than men now graduate from college (54% vs 46%), women have increasingly entered the workforce and undertaken demanding careers of their own, driving couples to move further from their roots…and thus further from their family support systems, too.

America the isolated

For women, the pull away from their hometowns in pursuit of fulfilling careers is a double-edged sword. Without family close to provide support as they raise kids of their own and with the cost of childcare simultaneously going through the roof, it is, far more often than not, women who bear the burden of childcare, taking a step back from their career in order to do what’s best for their family. But now, it’s also likely that they’re no longer surrounded by the network of extended family or lifelong friends that they moved away from in the first place. Perhaps then it is not surprising that women are 10% more likely than men to say that it is important for them to live in a community where family is nearby. 

The draw of professional opportunities, however, is certainly not the only aspect of American life that sociologists have pointed to to explain the isolation that many might feel in their current living situations. Unlike many other nations and cultures, the United States has long clung to the model of the nuclear family, which consists of just parents and their children under a single roof. Not only does such a family structure provide far less support to parents as they juggle work, kids, and everything in between, but it also simply reduces the number of close, reliable relationships that many adults would have in an extended family model. Similarly, Americans have long valued the status and privacy afforded by owning large, secluded homes where they may not have to see or interact with their neighbors on a daily basis. In contrast, researchers have observed the following benefits of living close to one another: 

When one person becomes happier, their next-door neighbors’ chances of also growing happier rise by 34 percent; friends living within a mile of each other are 25 percent more likely to feel happy, and their friends have a 10 percent chance of feeling happier too. Live around people who make you happy, and you might create a feedback loop that perks up everyone around you.

America the lonely

A monthly poll conducted by the American Psychiatric Association found that in early 2024, roughly 1 in 3 Americans reported experiencing feelings of loneliness at least once a week over the past year, while 1 in 10 said they were lonely every day. Americans have fewer friends and spend less time with friends than ever before. Tragically, research suggests that those who are lonely not only suffer from “a range of health problems, including heart attacks, strokes, cancers, eating disorders, drug abuse, sleep deprivation, depression, alcoholism, and anxiety,” but they also have a 26% higher risk of dying than their unlonely peers. In 2023, the United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared that there was an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” across the country. The following excerpt from his report captures the breadth of the challenges faced by a society composed largely by lonely individuals:

The lack of social connection can have significant economic costs to individuals, communities, and society. Social isolation among older adults alone accounts for an estimated $6.7 billion in excess Medicare spending annually, largely due to increased hospital and nursing facility spending. Moreover, beyond direct health care spending, loneliness and isolation are associated with lower academic achievement and worse performance at work. In the U.S., stress-related absenteeism attributed to loneliness costs employers an estimated $154 billion annually. The impact of social connection not only affects individuals but also the communities they live in. Social connection is an important social determinant of health, and more broadly, of community well-being, including (but not limited to) population health, community resilience when natural hazards strike, community safety, economic prosperity, and representative government.

Of course, Americans’ choices of living situation do not fully explain the wave of loneliness and isolation that’s swept across the nation. Other factors like the dramatically increased use of social media, just to name one, undoubtedly play a role. That said, it’s hard not to see how a sense of community taking a back seat in American’s decisions to relocate might contribute to the loneliness experienced by so many today.

America the hopeful

Despite the bleak picture painted by the state of isolation in American society, there are reasons to believe we can collectively be happier with where we choose to live moving forward. Rapidly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of remote work has opened up a world of new opportunities for a large portion of the American workforce. In the early months of 2023, the percentage of job-seekers moving for work hit an all-time low. A 2022 survey of over 25,000 Americans conducted by McKinsey found that as many as 35% were able to work remotely full-time, while an additional 23% could do so at least part-time. And as remote work has become more common, many employees are now demanding it, with 57% saying they would look for a new job if their current company didn’t allow remote work. For many Americans, this all means that they are no longer tethered to the city in which their employer is located. Instead, their community of family and friends can more easily play a central role in the decision of where to call home.

At the same time, the increased spotlight on loneliness in the United States is cause for optimism. Thanks to the Surgeon General’s advisory, renewed attention has been given to ways of living that may make us all happier, such as Logan Ury’s concept of investing in “Other Significant Other” (OSO) relationships, or “friends who provide an integral role that romantic partners are unable to fill.” Ury, a behavioral scientist, Director of Relationship Science at Hinge, and author of the bestseller How to Not Die Alone, wrote about the concept of OSOs from a very personal perspective after her now husband’s cancer diagnosis that led them to find support through living in a co-owned community where roughly a dozen or so people in their 20s and 30s resided together. Ury describes OSOs as follows:

An OSO can be a friend or family member who fulfills a need that your significant other cannot: a triathlete who exercises with you because your partner doesn’t, or a sibling you call to vent about work because your significant other hates corporate politics. This web of support is not new, but for many of us, it has been lost.

For Ury and for so many of us, living close to Other Significant Others can transform our lives for the better. Perhaps it’s time they play as big a role in choosing our homes as any other factor.

Let us know what you think by voting in our poll and leaving an anonymous comment.

  💭 Our two cents

These days, both of us live a few hundred miles from the town where we grew up together, in (sadly) different major American cities. Before living where I do today (Miami) I used to live on the opposite side of the country (San Francisco), a few thousand miles from most of my family and several close friends. Being in tech, I moved there right after school mainly to live somewhere that would best position me for a budding career. Though I built up a community of close friends and a happy life there, I moved to where I live today after about 4 years, also in pursuit of a new job I was extremely excited about at the time. After uprooting my life, I knew I would have to start anew when it came to building a social life and support system in my new home, which, after some time and a good deal of effort, I was able to do.

But looking back, while I know I’d make the same choice again to move my life from San Francisco to Miami, I don’t think I’d be so eager to make a similar move in the future. The job I originally moved for did not pan out as I expected (to put it lightly lol) and after leaving that role, which I had put the vast majority of my energy into for the year prior, I realized that I had given myself very little to fall back on outside of the job and the friends I’d made from my coworkers there. Compared to close friends and family, jobs aren’t necessarily the most reliable things in the world. Companies can falter, managers may disappoint you, your passions might change…but your deepest relationships can support you for a lifetime. As someone who is probably prone to putting too much time into work, I’d certainly be lying if I said I was sure I wouldn’t make a move for a job again. But now, I think there’s a lot more I’d consider in the community around me that I didn’t always see before.

 ✅ You should also know…

  👯 We Needed More Significant Others:  “A cancer diagnosis in the midst of the pandemic led to our improvising a wedding and joining a commune, where our family of two became 14.” Check out Ury’s full piece. 

🩺 Surgeon General: We Have Become a Lonely Nation. It’s Time to Fix That: Read Dr. Murthy’s guest essay in the NYT after he issued his advisory on the state of loneliness and isolation across the country.

👂 The ‘Quiet Catastrophe’ Brewing in our Social Lives / What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal : Give these episodes of The Ezra Klein Show a listen to hear more about the research on the topics covered in today’s post.

💃 The girls have spoken

See last week’s poll results from “So…how much do you spend on friends' weddings?” below. :) 

💌 Up Next

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💖 S & J