# How We Spend Our Days... By [Joel Anderson](https://paragraph.com/@joelanderson) · 2021-11-20 --- It seemed fitting to start my journey on Mirror by sharing the topic that guides most of my thoughts (That lives in my head rent-free, to use TikTalk): > If how you earn a living and where you spend your days are two separate decisions, how do you decide where to live? Where a person lived used to be purely a function of how they earned income. College graduates immediately moved from their hometown or college town to the labor market best suited to their work. Finance graduates moved to New York, manufacturing specialists moved to manufacturing towns, and risk-takers excited about tech moved to Silicon Valley. It’s obvious to any young member of the workforce today that this is increasingly not the case. A person can work in finance and live in Phoenix; a tech worker can live in Florence, Alabama. Annie Dillard said: > How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. With this new freedom to choose how we spend our days, how do people decide? What sort of places will they choose? I’ve got three ideas. ### 1\. Living close to existing friends > "Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’” > > C.S. Lewis Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think there’s any substitute for face to face time with people one cares about (Sorry, Zuck) Research has shown and common sense supports the idea that there isn’t really a limit to the benefits of spending time with loved ones. (I need to do some more reading here, but I vaguely remember from either the Blue Zones study or Bowling Alone that additional spent time spent on socializing with a small group consistently adds to our wellbeing until something like 6-7 hours per day. In other words, almost nobody gets the ideal amount of socialization today.) Technology is useful insofar as it makes this possible or more frequent. If people can live anywhere, wouldn’t it make sense to choose to live where in person interactions with people they care about are the default rather than the result of days or weeks of planning? (See: Euclidean zoning causing social isolation. I know in _Bowling Alone_ Putnam is hesitant to make definitive claims about the causes of declining social participation in America, but it just seems so obvious to me that urban design is mostly to blame for this. If you spread people out by miles, of course they’re going to see each other less!) ### 2\. Specific professional networks Despite what I just said about the abstraction of labor markets away from physical places making geography unimportant, I believe there is a special sauce that comes from building something with people in person. I think the most likely model for this is people bound digitally by a shared mission (In the same DAO, company, nonprofit, etc.), who then decide to live in proximity to one another, even if only for a while. The only thing that beats a “group chat with a shared bank account” is “a group of people living near each other and very determined to accomplish some specific mission with a shared bank account” ### 3\. Cost of living This is already a big topic: tech worker moves from SF to somewhere in the South. Google cuts pay 10%. But their cost of living drops 80%, so net-net they’re much better off. I expect this will continue. The forces pushes folks out of high COL metros are far stronger than what pulls them in now remote work is a possibility. Though many employers are starting to announce returns to the office, it seems like the power now rests mostly with the employee. They can demand to stay remote and if their current employer refuses, they will simply find a company that will allow it. The returns to personal autonomy during the work day seem to be too high. I don’t know how long this will stay true. Probably a decade or more. But eventually, won’t living costs eventually normalize across metros to some degree? It makes sense for housing costs to be higher in areas where economic opportunities are also greater because of the concentrated labor market. But if that changes - if the previously geographically bounded labor market is digitized - will the price people are willing to pay for access to that labor market decrease towards a national average? I really have no idea. Thank you for reading this far. I am very excited to begin publishing online. More than that, I am excited to start testing these hypotheses about great communities in person. Stay tuned for more updates on that. --- *Originally published on [Joel Anderson](https://paragraph.com/@joelanderson/how-we-spend-our-days)*