This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live

What could I do to feel happier living here? … 1. Walk more. 2. Buy local. 3. Get to know my neighbors. 4. Do fun stuff. 5. Explore nature. 6. Volunteer. 7. Eat local. 8. Become more political. 9. Create something new. 10. Stay loyal through hard times.

We speak of searching for happiness, of finding contentment, as if these were locations on an atlas, actual places that we could visit if only we had the proper map and the right navigational skills.

If you want to love where you live, act like someone who loves where they live.

In a hypermobile society, uniformity passes for familiarity.

…believing that your town offers opportunities for enjoyable social interactions beyond your living room is key to how much you feel attached to it, and a good way to pinpoint your own perceptions about the stuff there is to do in your town is by asking yourself, ‘What would I show off to visitors?

For Don, changing underserved communities by choosing to live there is the ultimate expression of loving where you live. “Lots of people would like to see neighborhoods change,” he says, “but they don’t want to have to change their own life to modify them.

Faced with developing a brand-new social network [after having moved cross-country to a new city], her approach was: Show up to everything; talk to everyone.

Was it possible to pine for a place I’d been perfectly happy to leave? For a long time while I worked on my ‘love where you live’ experiments, I had thought of place attachment as an either-or proposition: either you adored your city and stayed there forever in connubial bliss, or you didn’t. Moving was a failure of commitment and love.

Our experience of the place where we live depends entirely on who we are, how we interact with it, and how we interpret what’s happening around us. We create our places every day by how we choose to view them…we must forcefully insist on seeing a place’s charms.

A one hour drive each way to work diminished life satisfaction so drastically that commuters would have to make 40% more money at their job to be happy as non-commuters.

In his book, Who’s Your City, the demographic Richard Florida divides people into three categories: the mobile, the stuck, and the rooted. We tend to focus on the first two—the mobile, who can pick up and move to opportunity—and the stuck, who lack the resources to leave where they are…but we cannot forget about the rooted: those who have the means and opportunity to move, but choose to stay…because they’re content where they are.

Yet there was something noble in the way Gertie presided over her home town, surrounded by people to whom she’d made herself useful, like the now-grown children who once rode her school bus, or the neighbor woman she took to Walmart every other week for quilt fabric.

He swiped my credit card, dropped my shirt into a plastic bag, and said, “Thanks for coming in tonight. It’s awesome what you’re doing. We really appreciate it.

The more uprooted I felt, the more I longed to be moored in place. In a world that’s supposedly flat, loving where we live still matters, even when we move a lot. Maybe especially when we move a lot.