"Any plans for Thanksgiving?"
"Yeah, going home."
"Oh nice, where's home?"
It's the most common exchange in America this week. Offices half-empty, Slack statuses set to away, everyone in transit toward the place and people our therapists have heard so much about.
Where are you from?
We ask it constantly. First dates, work meetings, airport bars. It's small talk, but it's not small. Where you're from is shorthand for who you are. Your accent, your assumptions, your comfort with weather and notion of what counts as a long drive.
The question asks for geography, but the answer offers biography.
I'm writing this week’s newsletter from the plane, SFO → BOS.
Same flight I've taken for years. In a few hours I'll pull up to the same house and walk through the same door. The house will look exactly like it did when I left for college. The walls don't change, that’s the disorienting part. I'm the one who's supposed to have changed, and I'm never quite sure how much I have.
There's something about going home that compresses time. You walk in as a 31-year-old and feel 17 within minutes. Not because I’m immature, but because the house still holds the version of me that lived there. The bedroom with the old books. The kitchen table where I did homework. The boxes in the closet filled with clothes and yearbooks and versions of myself I barely recognize.
Home is where I learned what dinner conversation sounds like, how stress gets handled, whether feelings get discussed or buried. Some of it was taught, but a lot of it was just absorbed.
Almost everyone I know is making this trip.
Those of us who can, anyway. Not everyone has a home that's still there, or a family that's still speaking, or parents who are still alive. The ability to go home is a privilege, to be sure.
Some are driving eight hours, other are navigating three connections. Some are staying in childhood bedrooms, others at the Holiday Inn because the childhood bedroom became a home office during the pandemic.
Those of us that are going home, if we're honest, are returning with a strange sense of incompleteness. For many, milestones that were supposed to accumulate by now haven't quite materialized. The life that was supposed to exist doesn’t yet.
We inherited a playbook from our parents: leave early, establish independence, build something that surpasses what they built. But that playbook assumed a world that no longer exists.
Going home brings all of this into sharp focus.
The house my parents bought would now require three incomes and a miracle. The stability they achieved by 30 has become aspirational for people who work just as hard. I sit at the same table where I learned what a normal life looked like, in a version of normal that's no longer accessible.
None of this is tragic, necessarily. But it is true.
It’s not that I’m failing to grow up. I’m just building adulthood with a different playbook. Renting instead of owning. Delaying instead of defaulting. Improvising over terrain that was far more stable for them than it is for me.
But home isn’t really about economics. Home is where we learned the rules of a world built on conditions that have disappeared. We watched our parents build lives inside an economy that rewarded linear progress, predictable milestones, and stability that could be earned through effort.
We took those rules as givens.
Then the givens vanished.
We entered adulthood just as the milestones we were raised to expect became luxury goods. The emotional assumptions we learned at home were calibrated for a level of security modern life no longer produces. Home trained us for an adulthood that was once standard and is now scarce. It taught us to expect trajectories the current world cannot deliver, no matter how hard we try.
Our twenties become an attempt to outgrow those expectations. Our thirties become the recognition that the expectations still shape us.
Where are you from?
It sounds like a question about place.
What it really asks is which version of adulthood raised us, and how far it drifts from the one we are actually living.
This week, millions of us will sit at tables in houses we didn't choose, surrounded by people we didn't choose, shaped by forces we barely understand.
We'll compare who we've become with siblings who started in the same place and ended up somewhere different. We'll feel the weight of expectation and the lightness of being surrounded by people who have known us since the very beginning. We'll eat too much and argue about nothing and remember why we left and why we keep coming back.
Going home may not make you a kid again, but it will remind you that you never fully stopped being one.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Up and to the right.