Relocation Nation: Why People Are Moving So Much And What It Means For America
How Mass Migration Could Change Families, Politics, and the Future of the Country
Thanks for reading The Nonlinear Life, a newsletter about navigating life's ups and downs. Every Monday and Thursday we explore family, health, work, and meaning, with the occasional dad joke and dose of inspiration. If you're new around here, read my introductory post, learn about me, or check out our archives. And if you enjoyed this article, please subscribe or share with a friend.
---
Americans are on the move. Will it change the country in meaningful ways or merely be a brief detour in our descent into division?
As longtime readers of The Nonlinear Life know, I’ve spent the last five years collecting and analyzing hundreds of life stories of Americans of all ages, all walks of life, and all corners of the country. A large reason I do this exciting-but-quite-labor-intensive work is that it can surface insights in real-time that are often invisible as we’re all going through them. The stories I’ve assembled and the findings I’ve identified form the basis of my last book, Life Is in the Transitions, and a new book I’m finishing this summer.
One moment in the analytical process has always stood out to me. While working on my last book, I was speaking with my team of ten coders one morning when I asked them, “Have any of you detected a pattern that I wasn’t thinking about when I was conducting the interviews?” One member of my team, a young economist, raised his hand.
“I notice that people move a lot during their life transitions.”
Indeed, I had not been asking this question specifically (though I have asked in all subsequent interviews), but we went back and coded for this question anyway. Here’s what we found:
Sixty-one percent of people mentioned that their transitions included some kind of movement. They sold a house, changed their workspace, emigrated, entered a nursing facility. In something of a surprise, of the three phases of a life transition – the long goodbye, the messy middle, and the new beginning – the messy middle was the least popular time for these moves, with 26 percent of people mentioning this phase; the long goodbye and the new beginning both tied at 37 percent. What explains these numbers?
Photo credit to studioroman via Canva
On one level, moving is the oldest story of all. From Moses to Paul, Confucius to the Dalai Lama, our greatest religious stories involve journeys of discovery. More recently, psychologists have begun to observe that in times of trauma, people get stuck, both physically and emotionally. Movement gets us unstuck. It restores agency by giving us the feeling we’re acting on our situation; it nurtures belonging by bringing us into contact with new people; it gives us a cause by giving us something to focus on.
Karalyn Enz of Princeton University, along with two colleagues, David Pillemer and Kenneth Johnson of the University of New Hampshire, asked people about memorable experiences in their lives. As they report in their study, “The Relocation Bump,” moves generated twice as many memories as comparable experiences. Their explanation: Each time we move, we go through our possessions, engage and reengage old memories, reconnect with milestones of meaning we may have forgotten.
As it has with so many aspects of our lives, the pandemic proved to be one of the largest social science experiments of relocation in generations. Riordan Frost, a researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, reports that the share of Americans moving each year has been falling for several decades. But the pandemic upended that trend. Data from the United States Postal Service, which tracks changes of address, show that permanent moves ticked up during the first year of the pandemic, and temporary moves skyrocketed.
Photo credit to Andy Dean Photography
A Pew Research Center study during the height of this migration concluded that a quarter of people moved because they feared getting COVID, twenty-three percent because their college campus closed, twenty percent because they wanted to be closer to family, and eighteen percent because of financial reasons, including losing their job.
Two years later, a host of new studies are bringing the impact of this relocation more clearly into view and suggesting that some of the changes from all this relocation may not be fleeting.
The USPS tracking data showed that big cities lost the most residents during the first six months of the pandemic, with New York, Chicago, and San Francisco topping the list. Frank Donnelly, a geospatial data librarian at Baruch College, CUNY, told the website MyMove that “migration from New York City has been a long-term trend.”
The areas that gained, meanwhile, were Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. United Van Lines, which has released studies of relocation for 45 years, found that “of the 10 states with the highest inbound move percentages, eight are among the twenty-five least densely populated states in the nation.”
The Brooking’s Institution echoes these findings. The think tank analyzed Labor Department data and found that since early 2020, the share of all U.S. jobs located in red states has grown by more than half a percentage point. Red states have added 341,000 jobs during that span, while blue states were still short 1.3 million jobs as of May. Of the 16 states that gained the most job growth in the last two years, eleven are red; of the ten at the bottom, 8 are blue.
As the Wall Street Journal summed up these trends: Red States Are Winning the Post-Pandemic Economy.
Photo credit to Monkey Business Images
And therein lies an important message. As we look at the current divisions in America, we often see them as static and unchanging. We can never escape; we’re doomed to conflict. But as the pandemic reminds us every day, life is nonlinear. Change happens. Old habits get broken; new habits get born. Especially in times of turmoil, the volatility itself gives us permission to create more volatility.
Change begets change. Moves beget moves.
And suddenly, as a result of these shifts in our lives, we find ourselves with new jobs, new neighbors, and maybe even new routines that allow us to see others with fresh eyes—and maybe even ourselves.
☀
Thank you for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, watch my latest TED Talk, or scroll through my other posts. And if you'd like to do a storytelling project with a loved one similar to the one I did with my father, click here to learn more.
You might enjoy reading these posts:
Why There's No Such Thing As A Midlife Crisis
Can You Answer These 10 Questions About America?
Don’t Be Happy: Why a Meaningful Life Is More Important Than a Happy One
Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.
Or, you can contact me directly.
---
(Cover Photo by Eivaisla from Getty Images via Canva)