Motivation
And if you feel just like a tourist in the city you were born, then it's time to go and define your destination, there's so many different places to call home -'You are a tourist' by Death Cab for Cutie
If you perceive the freedom of being able to live anywhere as a privilege, this post isn’t for you.
This post is for others, like myself, who are grappling with a darker side of freedom, chiefly the burden of having to choose. With so many options, so many variables, and so much uncertainty what is one to do? Cognitive impairment often arises when humans are presented with too many options.
Soren Kierkegaard called this phenomenon ‘the dizziness of freedom’ and Milan Kundera wrote a wonderful book loosely centered on this topic called ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’. And this phenomenon is not restricted to ‘major’ decisions, even something as unimportant as choosing which jam to purchase is subject to this phenomenon.
One way to overcome this issue is simply by flipping a coin, however, choosing where to live seems like a decision worth thinking (or overthinking in my case). It’s difficult to predict exactly how your residence will influence your life, but it will subtly shape every aspect of your life from the people you meet to the things you do and even your mood (seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is very real).
So how to chose where to live?
To me an extremely important factor of any community is the nature of the individual people, specifically the number of people who share some of my core values such as idealism, compassion, creativity, self-improvement, and deep connection. It’s difficult to measure these qualities in a person and impossible to do so at scale, however, I believe there is a proxy that captures the essence reasonably well: moving to a new city.
Moving to a new city requires having a dream more precious than the comfort of loved ones and the familiar. And having a dream requires feeling stultified by the status quo, a longing for something else, something better. Personally, I don’t care much what people long for, I find the shared sense of longing to be what connects me more deeply with others.
Don’t get me wrong, rural life has its perks, but it cannot compete with cities in terms of intellectual stimulation; in a city there is simply more to do and more people to do things with. And I get along best with people who have a dream so ravenous it demands the utmost stimulation.
With that in mind I did some simple analysis to understand what cities my fellow millennial dreamers move to.
Methodology
The short and dry summary of my approach is to use information from the US Census Bureau to rank ‘cities’ by the # of millennials and then breakout how many of those millennials are ‘transplants’. As a bonus I also included millennial male:female ratio to avoid moving to an area where the dating landscape would be unfavorable.
That said, I think it’s also worth commenting on the significance of such a simplistic and shoddy approach. This approach does not take into account population density, cost of living, weather, education levels, and many other aspects that are critically important. A lot of this information is available, however, it takes a fairly specialized skill-set to navigate US Census data.
In the past, I would have spent hours trying to make the analysis as robust as possible before ultimately giving up because it wouldn’t be ‘perfect’. There is virtue in not wanting to spread false and/or misleading information, however, there is also virtue in recognizing when something is good enough and this is actually a necessity since we live in a world of imperfect information.
There is another lesson here: no matter how robust the analysis, this is probably a case of information bias (defined as ‘a cognitive bias to seek information when it does not affect action’). Your experience living in a city cannot be satisfactorily predicted with even 100 variables. Ultimately, the best thing to do is visit and experience it yourself. If you cannot do that, analysis is fine, but don’t forget to layer on more subjective measures such as the opinions of friends or strangers on reddit.
To recap: don’t let perfection stop you (but be excessively transparent about assumptions and limitations). And don’t neglect your personal subjective experience in favor of objective measures.
In that spirit, I want to make the shortcomings of this analysis abundantly clear:
- I took % born in-state, % born out-of-state, and % born abroad from this website without verifying the source data (they claimed it was US Census data but who knows)
- I applied the above %s that refer to total population to a specific segment of population, which is certainly wrong, but hopefully not too wrong
- Population figures are from 2021 (while the %s are from 2020)
- Transplants does not include people who moved between cities within a state (only out of state or out of country)
Pack Your Bags
Top 10 Largest Millennial Domestic Transplant Cities
Although I was surprised to see Philadelphia and Houston on this list, I was more surprised to not see Denver, Austin, or San Francisco. It feels like everyone is moving to those cities so add this to the long list of times our feelings were misleading (although it could be an issue with the methodology).
I was also surprised to see how many domestic millennial transplants are in Washington D.C.–almost as many as New York, the biggest of apples!
If you’re looking for millennial heterosexual love, it looks like Seattle and Atlanta are the best places for females and males respectively.
Now this isn’t the only way to define ‘transplants’. I excluded transplants who were born in a different country. I did so because sometimes ‘foreigners’ and ‘americans’ mix like oil and water and for non-trivial reasons.
That said, it feels wrong to entirely exclude international transplants. Two of my better friends were born outside the United States and foreigners often have a a better sense of the American Dream than ‘native’ Americans–they are more American in a sense.
Top 10 Largest Millennial Domestic + International Transplant Cities
This visual gives you a better sense of the diversity of transplants, at least in terms of country of origin. New York, Los Angeles, and Miami have a large % of all millennial transplants coming from abroad, whereas Phoenix and Atlanta do not.
This framing also has its limitations. I’m not sure anyone wants to hang out solely with transplants. Locals are cool too and play a large part in making a city what it is.
Top 10 Largest Millennial Cities
If you want to have access to the most millennials–regardless of where they came from–New York is on a level of its own. Los Angeles isn’t too far behind, but it is much less connected due to sprawl, zoning regulations, and lack of public transportation.
Atlanta and San Francisco are the best or worse places to live depending on your dating preferences.
Philadelphia has the highest % of millennials born in America (on this list) if that’s your thing.
Despite the data
Based on this analysis there are several cities ‘better’ than the city I have chosen to move to.
But in San Francisco I have the opportunity to see my co-workers in person more regularly and that’s very valuable to me. San Francisco also has many other things going for it that aren’t in this analysis such as great weather, nature, and high education levels (in addition to many drawbacks such as high cost of living and rampant homelessness and drug abuse).
There is no such thing as a ‘right’ decision, but you can make a decision right (more on this). And if this is a truly heinous
There is no such thing as the ‘right’ decision, but you can make a decision ‘right’. And if this is a truly catastrophic decision, then I will have learned something (and will report back!)
