I wonder what factors come into play for those of us who stayed close to home and those of us who are farther away. I didn’t hate where I grew up, but always just assumed I’d end up somewhere else. Left for college at 17 and never moved back “home.”
I dunno. My dad was in the Air Force, so I was well used to moving around, and have no deep roots in any one place. As it was, the idea of “home”, to me, is simply where I live at the moment.
So, to me, the idea of moving ~10,000 miles was just a pain in the neck, not an existential change. Maybe if had been to a more “foreign” place than Australia, one where I didn’t already speak the language… shrug
Heck, I don’t even remember where I was born, and I’ve only been back in Detroit once - long enough to spend the night, and then rent a car to visit my folks elsewhere in Michigan, on a trip from Australia.
In my case it was somewhat by chance. I stayed in my hometown after high school because I had no reason to leave. I got married, had kids, and decided to go back to school in my late 20’s. Community college then university in Portland. After graduating I was applying for jobs as far away as Chicago (a place I had never and still have never been to) when I got a tip that the community college in my hometown was looking for instructors. I applied, got hired, and 4 years later here I am… still. My wife has never wanted to leave so its worked out, I guess. I don’t particularly like it here – it’s very economically depressed, the people aren’t particularly friendly, and the politics are a red as can possibly be – but at this point we’re stable which is pretty important to me.
The hospital I was born in is the same hospital my two children, now teenagers, were born in. The hospital my wife was born in was razed 20+ years ago and now part of the lot is still rubble and the rest is a newly-built DHS office.
The college where I’m a professor is the same college my father graduated from in 1979.
For me, it’s not that I never left: I did, and lived in Montana (on the other end of the country) for over a decade. It’s beautiful country out there, and I wouldn’t mind living there permanently, but I still have family around here (my mom still lives in the house I grew up in, for starters), and I wanted to be closer to them, so I moved back.
Born in the far North West of England, live in the deep South East, about a 400 mile drive.
HOWEVER - had the question been, How far do you live from where your great grandmother was born, the answer (as my brother discovered a few years ago) would be about four miles. Three generations of being economic migrants, and we ended up back where we started. Huh.
Well, the ISS is only 255 miles above the surface of the earth at the maximum, so that doesn’t make a huge difference compared to terrestrial distances.
I recall an episode of Barney Miller in which a character complained about being relocated to Billings, of which he said “It’s like Cleveland, with sheep”. Can you attest to the accuracy of that statement?
Well, I was in Bozeman, not Billings, but I have no idea what he’d be referring to there. The county Cleveland is in has about as much population as all of Montana, the geography is dominated by a Great Lake instead of mountains, and Montana has many more cows than sheep. About the only thing they have in common is that neither one is Los Angeles, which might be enough similarity for a TV writer.