Is there anybody on this blog who lives in the same place they were born? By place I mean a city, a town, or at least a state? There are several very young readers here, so it might be true for them. Anybody else, though?
Are you friends with somebody who is living where they were born? Because I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t have close friends like that. I have two acquaintances but that’s about it.
I don’t even live in the same country I was born. But I am still friends with two of my old friends from school who still live in the same city. I see them every year when I visit my family in my old hometown.
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My best friend from high school is in Baltimore. My high school bullies, one is in Germany and another in Boston. My best friend from college in Ukraine is in New Jersey.
If I went back to Ukraine, I wouldn’t even have anybody to visit. Everybody’s someplace else.
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I do and I know a lot of people who do. It’s pretty common for people born here to stay all their lives, to stay friends with the people they went to high school with, etc. The city is growing now though so there’s more newcomers around than there used to be. But we’re still pretty provincial for a big city; even moving to the other side of the city is considered a big deal by some people (there’s west side/east side rivalry.)
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I’m actually the only member of my family that lives more than 25 miles from where we were born. But then people tend to want to stay in Southern California.
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I’m almost 30, and live in the same town I was born into. I spend most of my spare money on travelling though, and I’ve always made most of my friends online, so not quite sure where I fall on the fluidity/solidity split actually
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I do not have close friends back home, but I am Facebook friends with a dozen or so of my high school classmates and some people from my university years who still live in the same town of about 100,000 people…
And when I am getting there (admittedly seldom) we sometimes meet for real…
P.s. As far as I heard, my main high school bully is some kind of a mafioso in Russia.Those of my classmates who are in contact with both of us describe his arrangement with references to the “Brigade” series… 🙂
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I also know several of my high school classmates who live in the same town we grew up in, and more who live within 20 miles or so of there. Until recently, I had a friend who was born in Delaware and lived here her whole life. Recently, she retired and moved to Costa Rica.
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I don’t live in the same town any more, but I do know people from school who are. I’m 26 and from the UK. I grew up in Kent (in the south east of England) and went to university in the North. The year I left university my parents moved to Norfolk (a rural Eastern county) and I went with them, mostly because Norfolk is much nicer than the area of Kent I grew up in.
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I lived for 30 years in the same city and house in EU. Then moved out of the continent entirely. Clearly a tiny bit radical. However, I still spend 2 months a year back in the EU at home 🙂 One of the blessings of academic calendars! I could joke that I live in the EU but work in the US, because of my strong links back home.
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Even very young people might not live in the same place they first lived. My family moved a county over when I was three. If you want to get technical, I’ve never actually lived in the city in which I was born. Another friend was born in another state, but lived around where I am for most of her life. A lot of my sister’s friends aren’t living in the same place, but they’re all at college.
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For the purposes of this I’m going with same state because people will say they’re from [nearest big city] even if they’re three hours out and I don’t think switching small towns or suburbs nearby counts as fluid.
One of my high school best friends. She is super into her family history and I always enjoy her posts with old photos of her ancestors. She enjoys print making. I envy that.
My cousin’s wife (not the same city, but close and in the same state.) She’s a curator. She adores her extended family to pieces and is extremely personable.
Many of my brother’s high school friends.
An ex-friend from middle school. I feel bad because I couldn’t be there for her in the way she needed.
Otherwise, everyone is fluid.
I get to be fluid because my mother decided she wanted to give birth with her parents around her so she flew to them instead of having them fly to her. Lucky me. I don’t have the temperament required but I’ve got that life anyways.
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I don’t, but wish I lived where I was raised, would move back, and have a lot of friends there who never left.
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Almost everyone that I know in my home town and country still lives there. Almost everyone that I met after moving abroad for a PhD lives somewhere else and many have moved places and countries several times. I think this is more the characteristics of international academia than anything else, where people move for PhD, postdoc, and then various stages of academic jobs.
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I was born in a certain town in the North-East of England and have pretty much lived here the entire time, barring university which was itself no more than a half-hour or so drive away (in Durham). The house I’m living in we moved into when I had just turned five years old. (Yes, I still live with my mother, and I’m 33).
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I don’t, but I’m in academia so no surprise there. Of the people I still keep in contact with from high school, a lot of people left the town, but stayed in one of the nearby larger cities (this is in California). I think only a few folks actually stayed in exactly the same town. Only a very small number of us left the state/country.
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I know quite a few people that were born here in Sulaimani.
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Of course, fluidity is very geographically and economically circumscribed. As I say in my new book, not everybody can afford to flirt with fluidity.
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I, of course, am living on a different continent. Most of the people I know are Polish (many not born in the city or region that I’m in) but also from other European countries as well as Africa and Asia. There’s only one person born on the American continent I have any kind of regular contact with (work friend, which is not the same as work friend in the US).
But my parents were fluid when fluid wasn’t cool (not really internationally but in other ways and trying to be more solid for me and my brother certainly came at some emotional cost for them)
Fluidity is not something that’s weird for me (but it comes with a price that most people don’t necessarily want to pay).
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Americans in the U.S. typically are geographically where they started, especially if they don’t have much money. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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