Home for the Holidays

Every year, more people in the U.S. travel home for the holidays. NYTimes reported today that 37 million are on the road this Thanksgiving weekend. This number says to me that we are more mobile than ever, choosing to live near good jobs rather than near our families.

I currently live in Boston, with parents in upstate New York. My wife’s family is from Louisiana but they do Thanksgiving in Texas. Our siblings live in San Francisco and Spain. And next year, we’ll be moving from Boston to Chicago, where we have no family, just a strong feeling that it's the right city for us.

The reason we don’t live near our families anymore is because The Good Life to us depends foremost upon professional satisfaction. My wife and I will choose a city where we can both find stimulating jobs that offer reasonable hours and reasonable pay. And after that, we will choose based on housing costs, aesthetics, weather, and cultural institutions. That is why my friends so often choose to go live in San Francisco, even though their families are a five hour flight away.

But isn’t living near family also The Good Life? Yes it is, particularly when it comes to raising children. There is no substitute for having your parents nearby. But now that the generation size has been lengthened, we no longer have to move near our parents. They can come to us. Since they had us in their 30s, and we are having kids in our late 30s, our parents will be just around retirement age when our children are born. All we have to do is convince them that they should move to the city we have chosen.

This weekend, as I sit in traffic with everyone else, I’ll be working on my pitch. And hopefully, in a few years, I’ll be staying right at home for the holidays.