Motion Sickness

Freeze. Don’t move. Remain in place. Don’t leave me this way. Oh, won’t you stay just a little bit longer. None of these requests are really necessary in America these days. We’ve long been known as a country of movers and shakers (an attribute that was core to our economic growth), but for a variety of reasons, we’ve become more known for inertia. (We still move and shake, but mostly just in the fetal position in front of our laptops.) “For generations, Americans have chased opportunity by moving from city to city, state to state. U.S. companies were often quicker to hire—and to fire—than employers in other parts of the world. But that defining mobility has stalled, leaving many people in homes that are too small, in jobs they don’t love or in their parents’ basements looking for work.” WSJ (Gift Article): Nobody’s Buying Homes, Nobody’s Switching Jobs—and America’s Mobility Is Stalling.

+ This lack of locomotion shouldn’t come as a static shock because I’ve covered it before: The U-Haul of Mirrors: “I move so rarely from the couch indentation where I write NextDraft that my kids occasionally place a finger under my nose to see if I’m still breathing. But these days, more and more Americans are not moving; at least not from their communities. A country that was once defined by how often people moved has changed dramatically in recent decades—and the trend has left other core characteristics like entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, and social equality stuck in the mud.”