re: Newspaper vet folds, moves to Houston: "New Orleans has become a hard city to grow old in"

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But some people today are afraid to move a few hundred miles.

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What is the sum of a life?

Is it taxes? Is it a home? Is it a job? Friends? A family? A church? Hobbies? A neighborhood?

It’s all of those things and more.

When one moves (particularly when they move more than an hour or two’s drive away), there are some things they take with them and some things that are permanently left behind which they must recreate in the place they move to.

Imagine living in the place you grew up. Your parents and siblings and extended family are mostly there, your childhood friends are all there, as are all of the hobbies, social networks and everything else you accumulated as a result of growing up there.

When you move far enough away to no longer access those things on a whim, what do you take with you? Well, if you’re married, you might take the most important members of your family. You will make a new home in the new place with a new job. Some hobbies are easily portable while others will require a little diligence to replicate in your new place with new people. You cannot take your friends or extended family or your social network with you. You have to make new friends and build new networks. You have to shop at new stores with different products available. You have to eat at different restaurants. For some, this is seen as opportunity, but for those who really like their lives where they grew up, it feels more like loss.

Moving for economic opportunities is often a necessity, which is why so many people do take the leap. However, no one ever moves more than a 4 hours drive away without losing some of the things from their life where they used to be. You simply cannot pack up everything you loved about your life and transplant it somewhere new.

For people with deep roots in a community, the costs of uprooting themselves and having to start over from scratch somewhere else often outweighs the economic incentives to relocate. If you really enjoy your life where you’re from, it takes a much bigger carrot or stick to drive you out. Few individuals in Louisiana history have ever wielded a bigger stick than Latoya swings now.

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Unless you're a native American, at some point your family relocated to the US from wherever they came from to make a better life.

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Theirs did too, just a lot sooner.

Neither they nor I know any family members who did the immigrating so what's the difference?