Most of us don’t get to choose where we find ourselves. The reasons are multifold…we live where can make a living, or where an ailing relative lives, or where our grandkids are growing up too fast and we don’t want to miss it.

But many of us do have that choice, and the number of us who do has exploded since the advent of remote work and (relatively) early retirement. And then the question we should ask ourselves, daily, is: what am I doing here?

This doesn’t mean “why am I in this particular relationship, or in this particular job, or in this particular frame of mind.” It’s the radically simpler, reductionist, and in a way more revealing question about simple physical location: why am I located in this particular place on the planet rather than any of the other places l might be?

If we’re honest, the most obvious and rather embarrassing answers are, first, chance; and, second, inertia. When we examine the events that brought us, physically, to where we are, they reveal themselves as a daisy chain of happenstance:

When I was growing up, my family and I were American Bedouins, briefly rooted, then moving on. We were children and I suspect our parents were too, though to us they were gods who determined our fate. In their first fourteen years of marriage they would have ten different homes.

My father was a salesman and his work involved his being “transferred,” as we put it, to a different, usually distant city every two or three years. Hence, though I was born in Detroit, my brother was born a mere three years later in Philadelphia, where our mother had spent her entire life, up to the time she met and married the man who would become the reason her sons would never be able to say where they were “from.” She lived that marital vow, “whither thou goest, I will go.” She had no idea what she’d bargained for.

When she died in her eighties, she left behind some carefully-organized papers in a small metal file cabinet, including a hand-written itinerary of her married life, year by year, place by place, some twenty different homes in all, spanning fifty years and two countries and crisscrossing the continent. Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Birmingham, Philadelphia (again), St. Louis (again), Monterrey, Mexico, Mexico City, Pittsburgh. All these before I was twelve.

I went to college in Ohio because my parents had settled in western Pennsylvania. I went to law school in New York City because a college mentor suggested Columbia and I was accepted there. I lived in the city for the next decade because that’s where Columbia funneled its law school graduates. I moved to California because another mentor and some of my closest friends had moved there. Decades later, I moved back to Ohio because my wife fell in love with the little town where I’d gone to college.

And so on.

And once we’re in a place, habit and friendships (which are the finest form of habit) tend to root us there.

To be sure, not everyone is so easily led and, once led, not everyone becomes rooted in a particular place. I have dear friends who have five homes scattered across the American continent and regularly shuttle among them. My brother and his wife, having lived in the same house in Columbus, Ohio for over 40 years, moved to Boise, Idaho, and after a handful of years there, to Portugal, then back to Boise, then to Columbus again.

These are what might be called conscious self-placements. They get easier as one grows older, when there’s no longer the trumped-up tie to a job or to one’s kids’ educations that come with a place attached.

Thirty years ago I predicted to my then college-age daughter that the tyranny of office work would be toppled in her lifetime, that electronic communication would eliminate the absurd requirement that we assemble in large buildings in the middle of cities in order to get anything “corporate” done. It hasn’t quite come completely true, but we’re well on the way there, and then the question of where we want to put ourselves will be answered by other factors, such as where the cost of living best matches what we earn or have saved, or where climate change is least threatening, or where a critical mass of friends or family members decide to assemble.

This last factor has already grown in importance, as young adults remain longer in their parents’ homes for financial as well as familial reasons, and a seriously aging adult population becomes ever more numerous and begins to seek out living arrangements outside of retirement homes that nonetheless offer some of the social and economic benefits of communal living. In my latest novel, Tell Me Again (coming this December —go preorder, I’ll wait), the protagonist ruminates on the absurdity of solitary older couples clinging to the homes they’ve outgrown:

I’d long thought that the way most of us live is absurd,
married off in fragile little dyads that we frantically fortify with kids
and pets and wall off from the world by spending inordinate amounts
of time and money on spaces and buildings in which to maintain that
separateness, until we grow old and the pets die and the kids move away
to replicate this folly, leaving us paired alone again in these expensive,
mostly unused monuments to some outworn notion of domesticity.

And through all those decades of adult life, we pantomime what we
really need and want by coming together constantly at dinners, parties,
weddings, funerals, tailgates, commencements, campouts, group vacations,
extramarital affairs and class reunions, all of us wanting to bust
out of the tidy boxes we’d been taught to call home and return to the
broader tribe of nomads with whom we once sat watch in the primal
night, told one another stories, cooked one another’s meals, and raised
one another’s children.

What, indeed, am I doing here, and where should I optimally be? Next time your dinner party conversation flags, go around the table and have each guest explain why they’re living where they are, and, if different, where they’d ultimately like to be. The answers may come down to a need to escape harsh winters or harsher solitude, or the wish, finally, to learn a foreign language or way of life. It may be driven by money or driven by love, or by that chancy mix of the two that we tend to call necessity.