Euro perspective: sounds like an american problem of people moving halfway across the country instead of usually settling down nearby with their highschool friends doing mostly the same thing.
Another big one is housing in America is very difficult to obtain, so even if you live in the same city as your friends, it's difficult to live near each other because people live in the houses they were able to get, and American cities are very sprawled out.
It's very common to have to drive 30+ minutes in different directions per friend, which makes spontaneous meetings difficult.
And in my adopted European city everyone I know is from somewhere else. Europe isn’t one thing though maybe where you are your scenario is the norm.
Whereas the median foreign born population in the EU in total is around 10-15%, and an even smaller percentage of that is internal EU migration.
In both cases it's going to be migration from say New York to New Jersey, or The Netherlands to Belgium. So in terms of tearing up your roots it's not much of a move.
But Americans routinely move from say Miami to Seattle or whatever for a job. Distance-wise that's like Ireland to Greece or Turkey.
We Europeans simply don't do that at the same rate, although it's gradually on the increase.
Moving to another city in the same country is popular. And even in terms of not moving city the image of people settling down in the same part of the city that they grew up and all being near their high school friends is just not reality.
The real metric you'd want is travel time to "home base" in hours. I'm just suggesting that inter-state/country moves are a useful fuzzy approximation of that.
Marriage as often presented is an idealistic fantasy, not something that really happens much.
I honestly feel so lucky.
One of them moved 6 hours away but we talk and game every week on discord.
I'm from small town canada. People here are notoriously less ambitious than Americans or at least than big city Americans.
The one college friend of mine who moved to silicon valley I don't get along with anymore. He's just tuned to a higher frequency of activity and we can't share time effectively. It's like the SV lifestyle created ADHD in him. We can never just do nothing. We always have to be discussing something "important" or doing something "cool".
Sometimes I like to sit on my deck for an hour and let the thoughts creep by.
I used to feel envious of his wealth, power and prestige. But now that I have a wife and child and can see my distant future, I do not envy him.
I'm not in Silicon Valley, but I am in tech, and I notice myself slipping towards this as well. More and more, I find myself letting the current hot topic of the day run through my mind non-stop, over and over. I am unable to simply take a break from it all. I no longer have the patience to just sit on a deck for an hour with my own thoughts, I have to be reading news articles or learning a new skill or I feel like I am "wasting" my time.
I am envious of you and your kindergarten friends. Most of my high school and college friends have moved away, and I don't reach out to them enough.
Most people don't move away from home in the US.
Depends on what your ambitions are in life. Which goes back to first sentence.
160km sounds pretty close. Near by, even. I can make that drive happen at a much higher frequency than a 750 km drive.