In another thread, Snooooopy asked about the effects of moving around a lot, to wit:
My reply kept growing in length, to the point that I felt it better to start a new thread for it.
The good aspects of moving a lot were that I developed a tolerance for change and a strong sense of the impermanence of jobs, homes, etc., which has been useful in my working life, since people tend to change jobs and locations far more than they used to. I developed an understanding that different people in different places do things differently, have different priorities and values, and expect different things. Since all of the moving around I did as a child was within Arkansas, it wasn’t so much a matter of seeing a lot of different places (though there’s a huge difference between the Delta region of eastern Arkansas and the mountains of northwestern Arkansas, and between either of them and the area around Fayetteville) as of being around different people and having to adapt my behavior, way of speaking, and interests in order to fit into a new social group. On the one hand, I developed an intense sensitivity to differing social norms and expectations and gained experience of a broad range of mores and attitudes that is still quite useful in allowing me to discern and adapt to differing circumstances, but on the other I became extremely self-conscious in many ways, constantly monitoring and tweaking what I did, what I said and how I said it in order to fit in. Having moved three times between the end of fifth grade and the beginning of seventh, a highly self-conscious age for anyone, only heightened this tendency, and no doubt is partly responsible for my highly conventional nature. While I may have indulged in superficially unconventional behavior as an adolescent and young adult, including drug and alcohol use, unorthodox musical tastes, esoteric intellectual interests, and so on, much of it was a conscious or half-conscious attempt to conform to the norms and expectations of particular groups with which I aligned myself. Now, as a suburban paterfamilias I have a strong aversion to behavior that excites comment or attention among my neighbors. Undoubtedly some of this is simply my personality, some portion of which is genetic (my mother is very much the same way), but I do think my experiences also played a significant part.
One also learns, after a few moves, that each time you completely change your circle of acquaintances, you have an opportunity to reinvent yourself; to define a new identity that need have nothing to do with the one you assumed to fit into the old situation. You also become aware that everyone else is also playing a role that they’ve selected or had placed on them – when you’re always adjusting your behavior to fit in, you’re inevitably made conscious of the dissonance between your “nature” and your behavior. The realization that everyone else is doing the same is a natural inference from that.
At some level, there’s always some principle of selection in operation that approves certain actions or statements and disapproves others before they’re made manifest in deeds or words, and part of the algorithm for making those choices is the reception they’re likely to receive from others. Thus, I’m always suspicious of people who attempt to explain their behavior by claiming that it’s “just who I am” or “I’m just being me”; “me” at a neighborhood homeowners’ association meeting is a very different thing than “me” at home with my kids or “me” getting together with friends from college – we all have a variety of identities, each of which is highly determined by the situation in which they’re prevalent. On the other hand, I have the example of my wife and kids to show me that the conscious selection and self-manipulation of behavior is far more pronounced in me than in many other people, and I think the repeated experience of having to discern and adapt to the norms of new groups has a lot to do with that.
A corollary to this is that having experienced life in different places increases one’s awareness of the existence and importance of events elsewhere. Many people I knew who’d always lived in the same place seemed to have little or no sense of the world beyond their local milieu; whatever happened to them and the people they knew was the world for them. Having lived in other places, however, makes one necessarily aware that there are people elsewhere doing things that one has no notion of, often doing them in very different ways than they were done locally. I do think this broadened scope makes one more likely to consider the possibility of many alternative ways of doing and being, of the possibility of solutions to problems that others with a narrower field of vision might not even consider.
I also got, in sixth grade, the sort of academic wake-up call that a lot of fairly bright kids don’t get until they’re in college, particularly when they’re from smaller towns. My first five years of school were spent in a small eastern Arkansas farm town. Of the kids in the same grade, I was unquestionably one of the two or three most academically competent; I’d been reading since I was four, and found it extremely easy to excel in school without expending much effort. Before sixth grade, we moved to town in the northwestern part of the state, and again in the middle of the year to a much bigger town. In both schools, I found the standards much higher, so that for the first time I was compelled to actually work at getting straight As. Then, before seventh grade, we moved to Fayetteville. Since it’s the seat of the University of Arkansas, a lot of my new classmates were smart kids, the children of professors and administrators at the university, with a lot wider range of experiences and much greater emphasis on learning than most of my cohorts at previous schools. Suddenly, it wasn’t a matter of having to work to get straight As, it was a matter of having to work hard not to get Cs or Ds, and having to really hump to get As. I also realized that being smart wasn’t nearly as special or rare as I’d been led to expect up to that point. I managed well enough, though with no particular distinction, for the rest of my secondary school career, and entered college ready to buckle down and work on things that interested me. A lot of my classmates at Hendrix (a fairly selective school, particularly by Arkansas standards) had only lived in the same sort of small towns as the one I started out in, and had always been the smartest kid in the class, never having to really work to succeed. Many of them didn’t make it through the first year, and most of the ones that did took it in the GPA for a year or so until they got over themselves and set about the business of college in earnest.
Generally, I think moving around frequently had a positive effect on me, albeit one tempered by some negative aspects. I think I’m more tolerant, broad-minded, adaptable, and better able to view any current problems as short-term phenomena than I’d have been otherwise. I’d have preferred to finish my high school career in Fayetteville rather than moving right before my senior year (though the boost my GPA received as a result certainly helped me get into college and increased the amount of scholarship money I received). I could also wish that we’d moved to Fayetteville a year or two earlier than we did (when I was in my late elementary years, instead of at the very beginning of junior high), as I don’t think it’d have taken as long for me to establish a workable social identity if we had, and I’d likely have been more confident and self-assured in junior high and high school). But I don’t ever recall wishing that I’d stayed in one place throughout my childhood, nor do I do so now.