“Most people now are looking for ‘a better place,’ which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

My generation is ungrounded, which makes for bad culture and unhealthy individuals. I propose a solution: a return to the idea of vocation of place. This means we need to dig roots into the places we have been given. We need to put home, neighborhood, and city higher on the list of factors we consider when making life decisions. And we need to commit to lavishing our energies on the community we have chosen.

Our grandparents dreamed of picket fences. They saved up for a ring and a downpayment and happily settled into their picketed lives. They bought their TV and their car and their appliances and claimed dominion over their neat abode. Flocking from city and countryside alike to these sprawling communities of apparent perfection, fed microwave dinners and Leave it to Beaver ethics, they lived about 50 years of American suburban bliss and then packed themselves neatly away into retirement homes.

That American Dream did not produce the stable communities it had promised. 

One could write a number of articles explaining why, but for this piece it is enough to observe the fallout. Just a couple generations later, the picket fences planted by our grandparents have blossomed into walls separating us from our community. People used to shop at local markets and share vegetables with neighbors. Now, we don’t have the slightest idea where our food comes from. Early television coaxed kids away from backyard baseball and onto the couch for Saturday morning cartoons, even when it had only three channels. Now, we spend an average of 7 hours a day on screens. And even if a job wasn’t the most exciting part of a man’s life, at least he usually kept it for the sake of his family’s stability. Now, we change our careers like a girl changes clothes, scrolling through Indeed like an addict. We millennials are constantly fantasizing about Somewhere Else with the vague hope that freedom and change will remedy our pain. Yet instead of prospering in a Promised Land of self-actualization and comfort, we find ourselves #thriving with record rates of anxiety and depression, isolation, and overall unhealthiness that only keep getting worse. In all of this, millennials have partitioned ourselves off from the real world in front of us and lost a sense of identity with our community. We are trapped in the bramble grown from our grandparents’ dreams. 

America touts itself as a haven for freedom, but that “freedom” can easily become little more than escape in practice. The Pilgrims escaped the king. The Irish escaped the famine. The Pioneers escaped the city. The result: A society with a president that looks like a king, nutrient-starved abundance that looks like famine, and a suburban countryside that looks like a city. Is the American story one of escape or freedom? If escape, it makes sense that we seem to believe change is the solution to everything we don’t like about our lives. And there is little, if any, cultural pressure for permanence. We can change our jobs, friends, cities, families, even our genders! All because we are obsessed with “progress,” being true to ourselves, and following our dreams. Positive change is good and escape is sometimes necessary. However, our cultural tendency to constantly keep one foot out the door causes serious problems. Especially when we don’t know who we are in the first place.

On the societal scale, we have swaths of individuals living in suburban isolation units, traveling in enclosed pods in an endless loop between home and work, possibly punctuated with the novel additional stop at the drive thru. Without the support systems of a close-knit community, it is no wonder that we have seen increasing mental illness on every socioeconomic level. This isolation was most obvious during Covid. People even boasted that “Social Distancing is My Spirit Animal” on their t-shirts, demonstrating the trend even before the government forced us into it. And these problems are especially bad for people who have moved to a new city and are still telecommuting.

For these unhappy people, constant advertising offers a solution: Buy this car! Buy this cruise! Buy this house in our subdivision! This is the key to happiness! The billboards keep telling us that change will satisfy us. It’s hard to ignore their incessant message, so we grow unhappy with what we have and neglect the world in front of us to chase satisfaction we haven’t found. As a result, we become alienated from our homes, from each other, and from ourselves. After all, that’s what’s keeping us from being happy, right?

It should not be that way. 

I propose that we return to an understanding of vocation of place. People generally agree that one has a vocation to a specific person or state of life, sometimes a job—but how much do people discuss one’s calling to a specific place? Think of the virtues of knowing where you came from. On a recent trip to Ireland I was struck by gravestones that listed not only the name of the deceased but also the street address. Imagine: Danny O’Neill, 1 Donnelly Way, Kilkenny. Danny will live forever in death in that one plot of earth. I find it fitting that he did the same in life. Do any of us today live long enough in one place to be known by our address? Few do. It’s a shame.

To know where we are is to know our place in the cosmos. Americans used to self-identify with their immediate surroundings, whether small towns, farmlands, or urban immigrant communities. Remnants of that still exist, but the norm nowadays is for people to live in generic apartment complexes that could literally be anywhere, built by some nameless construction monolith, and to be more connected to the people sharing their internet fandom than the people sharing their walls. Suburbanites are not surrounded by forests where they can wander, churches where they can find solace, or pubs where they can socialize. At best, those are a short drive away. They might not be anywhere nearby. Suburbia is surrounded by places of shallow consumption: an endless repeating array of the same generic restaurants, shops, movie theaters, and other places for spending money. These are not places built to foster community; they are holding cells built to distract people from their malaise. 

In contrast to that dystopian landscape, imagine what would happen if I decided to take a firm commitment to exist in the place that my wise and loving God decided to give to me. I would take a greater interest in my immediate surroundings and might start picking up litter or gardening to build up the soil quality for years of harvests (much more than a year-long lease can allow). I would find friends that I can visit without needing to drive at least 20 minutes. I would probably get to know my neighborhood’s little quirks and the subtleties that make it unlike any other place. I would be close to my family and could eventually cultivate a delightful vine of connections that would build not just my family, but the family of God in the people around me. In our permanence we would really know each other, and then we could really trust each other. I would live a meaningful life, instead of constantly grasping at the next rung of the social or career ladder.

One individual who lived out this thought experiment was Wendell Berry. After college, he and his young wife went to New York to find artistic inspiration and establish himself as a writer. Suffering from immense creative block, he realized that his biggest source of inspiration was his home of Henry County, Kentucky. He returned to be “married” to the land, as he called it, to live a quiet life loving his community and digging in good soil. As he described it:

“Kentucky was my fate – not an altogether pleasant fate, though it had much that was pleasing in it, but one that I could not leave behind simply by going to another place, and that I therefore felt more and more obligated to meet directly and to understand. Perhaps even more important, I still had a deep love for the place I had been born in, and liked the idea of going back to be part of it again… Why should I love one place so much more than any other? What could be the meaning or use of such love?”

A Native Hill

What could be the meaning of such love? So much! Berry discovered a calling, a place to spend his one wild and precious life. As he returned to the region of his childhood, he found himself entering more deeply into a living, breathing reality instead of the idealized, fast-paced, artistic, unreal New Yorker life he had thought would fulfill him. He found that home was the place that brought him to life more than any other place.

Like Berry, it took some time before I recognized the place for which I was fated. I was not always in love with home. I expected to find somewhere more exciting, at least for a time. I wanted to go into the great wide world and make my fortune. However, after a year-long stint in Nashville, I was magnetized back to Cincinnati’s murky brown depths, her art deco edifices, her German ghosts, her industrial-artistic flair, her murals and sanctuaries and echoes of steamboats rolling down the river. There is something about her that is simultaneously grand and unassuming, and I couldn’t escape the hold she had on my heart.

Just as one man only has one woman he is called to marry—even if there were other good options, he does just marry one—a man may choose from many places but still be called to dwell in one. I think that’s what happened to me. I was called to know the Queen City best, and I am happy to show my love and affection for the way she has harbored me all these years. I often say that Cincinnati is the greatest city on earth. I certainly love her best of all the cities in the world.

Cincinnati, it turns out, is my fate. Perhaps she is yours as well.