These bits resonated

When I asked them, “Why haven’t you moved?” the answers I received were a look of confusion, then a shake of the head that indicated that I was the one who was confused, and then a simple, “Because it is home.”

Of all of these non-credentialed forms of meaning, place (and your culture) is the hardest for highly educated elites (front-row in my book2) to see as meaningful, because we are so transient. We are cultural chameleons, whose primary identity is tied to our openness to the new and our resumes, so we cycle through physical locations like steps on a ladder. They are something to advance us, not define us.